Viral Attack
by beb
Summary: Tucker's friend, T'Keisha, is viciously attacked by a ghost calling itself "Technus 0.7." Where did this primitive version of Technus come from, how did get transmitted as a computer virus. Why is someone trying to infect computers with ghosts?
1. Chapter 1

Viral Attack - Chapter One

"Thanks for babysitting for us, T'keisha," he said, opening out his wallet and pulling out the twenty dollars agreed on. Then he pulled out an extra five and handed it to her. "This is for doing it on such short notice," he added.

"Thanks, Mr. Albright," the girl replied, popped out of his car and ran up to her doorstep and let herself in with her key. Mr. Albright waited in the car until she had closed the door before driving off.

He was a good man that way. Thoughtful. East Gratiot, Illinois was a middle-class black community, better than a lot of communities south of Chicago but hardly crime-free. And his kids, four boys, while rambunctious, were well behaved. Of course she played with them for an hour or more after she arrived so that when bedtime came around at 9:00 they were always ready. From the grateful look Mrs. Albright had on their occasional nights out, T'keisha Fulton gathered that the boys tended to be a handful.

T'keisha closed the door softly and found her way upstairs. A small nightlight at the top of the stairs showed her the way. Even though it was only 10:30 her parents had already gone to bed. She entered her room, turned on a small desk lamp, then fall across her bed in a weary plop. She kicked off her sneakers, then started guiltily when they hit the floor with a loud _klunk!_ Her father got up in the middle of the night for his shift at the Coleman Manufacturing Co. as a maintenance engineer. He hated being awaken in the middle of, what was for him, the night. After a minute with not stirrings from across the hall, she relaxed and let out her breath.

Then awoke with a start, having fallen asleep where she lay.

T'keisha considered just sleeping in her clothes, but with a shake of her head got up and peeled off her T-shirt and jeans. She sat down at her desk and turned on a small fan before opening her laptop. The fan wasn't so much for her, though the August night was warm and the room a little stuffy. The fan was for her laptop whose own fan had conked out some while back and tended to overheat otherwise.

She was pretty sure there was an E-Mail from Tucker Foley. He had been writing to her most every night since they'd met at summer camp. Tucker was a nice kid; liked computers like she did and didn't think she was some kind of mutant because of that. He had a fun sense of humor, shared her love of manga and karate flicks. The pity was that he lived so far away in Amity Park. While the laptop was waking up she checked to make sure the baseball cap was still stuck over the webcam. It wouldn't do to accidently active the cam while she was in her underwear, though Tucker had seen her naked during that horrible ghost attack at summer camp. As she had seen him naked.

She blushed at the memory. The ghost thing absolutely terrified her. She hoped she'd never see another ghost ever again. But what she's seen of Tucker .... was kind of nice. T'keisha hoped that Tucker thought of her as well, though she was a tall skinny beanpole without any hips or boobs to speak of, darker skinned than he was with hair in tight cornrows.

As expected there was a letter from Tucker in her inbox. With an attachment.

She wondered what it was. It was big, nearly a megabyte. "Technus 0.7" Maybe it was a game he thought she'd be interested in. Before opening it, though, she started an anti-virus program and set it to scan the attachment. Her mail program had already scanned it for viruses but she always kept a second program handy in just case. It pronounced the attachment clean so she clicked on it.

The screen went blank then slowly a pointy green face began to resolve. It was oddly grainy, like a low resolution picture blown up too much. T'keisha could almost see the polygons the face was composed of. It didn't look like the start of any game she's ever seen before. With apprehension she waited for the face to speak.

"I am Technus 0.7!" it declared in a shrill, irritating voice, "Master of all things mechanical! I have taken over your computer! Soon I will take over all the computers of the world!" It began to laughing maniacally.

With a curse, T'keisha snapped the laptop shut and reached to pull the internet connect out of the back of the computer. Green hands oozed out of the crack between the halves of the laptop and wrestled with her. She pulled the laptop off the desk and flung it across the room. It landed with a loud clatter and sprang open. The green face was still there, laughing at her. "Foolish child! Did you really think you could thwart Technus 0.7, master of all things technological?" The face started pulling itself away from the laptop's screen and emerge into her room.

T'keisha scrambled across the room, picking up one of her shoes on the way. She slammed the laptop close again and hammered with her shoe on the parts of the weird ghost that was trying to crawl out of her computer. Each time she hit a finger or amorphous pseudopod there would be a yelp from inside. But the ghost kept trying to get free.

Desperately, the girl flipped the laptop over and pulled the battery pack out.

There was a strangled "Arrgh!" from the laptop as the hard drive braked to a stop. There was a _click_ as the monitor lost power.

T'keisha slumped where she was, sitting on the floor. The laptop slide out of lax fingers. She could hear stirrings across the hall. Snap! She'd awaken her father. She was trying to think what to tell him when green hands erupted from the laptop,yanking the lip open. "Little girl, did you think Technus 0.7 could be stopped by a little thing like that. _**I**_ control this computer. I decide when it will run and what it will run. I do not need your puny batteries to survive for I, Technus 0.7, am master of all things mechanical!"

T'keisha smashed the lip back down on the ghost trying to get out of her laptop. Grasping it in both hands she ran to the old ladder-back chair in front of her desk and brought the laptop down on one of the rails. Again and again she smashed it all the while the ghost was taunting her. Finally the portable bent in two and the ghost, with a wail of "I'll be back" evaporated into thin air.

By that time her father was pounding on her door, demanding to know what was going on in there. T'keisha grabbed a robe hanging on her closet door and opened the door.

"Child, what's the matter with you? Don't you know I gotta get my rest?"

"Sorry, Poppa. I didn't mean to wake you up."

"What you doing in here, anyway?"

Holding her robe closed, T'keisha tried to think what to tell her father. "A mouse ran across my room and I was trying to kill it." she stammered.

"A mouse! There are no mice in this house." her father declared with certainty.

"Maybe it came in through the window." T'keisha pointed to where one window was open a couple inches.

"Next time just chase it back out the window!" her father declared. He was turning to leave when he suddenly asked, "what the matter with your laptop. Why's it all in pieces. I paid good money for that thing."

"It had a virus..."

"Is that how you usually treat viruses?" he asked.

"It was a pretty obnoxious virus."

"Just have it working when I get home from work," he ordered and shuffled back to his bedroom.

T'keisha closed her door and sat on the foot of her bed and wept. She had never been so frightened in her life. Not even when that horrible ghost at summer camp had come boiling over the lake towards her had she felt this frightened. Of course, then she had Tucker and his friends there to protect her.

Tucker!

How dare he send her a virus! She was going to ream him out good. T'keisha reached for her wi-fi PDA and touched the "on" button.

"Foolish mortal!" a whinny voice booked from her PDA, "did you think it would be that easy to get rid of Technus 0.7?"

With a scream she threw the PDA out the window.

The tall black girl sat on her bed for ten minutes afraid to move, afraid to touch any of her other gadgets for fear that the weird, creepy ghost had somehow infected them as well. Eventually she recalled that there was an all-night convenience store three blocks away that still had a pay phone.

She pulled on her jeans and T-shirt, wiggled her feet back into her shoes and crept downstairs and let herself out of the house. She walked quickly towards the convenience store.

Danny Fenton was having The Dream.

He was at the local water park. Paulina, wearing a small bikini of nebulous color, had just asked him to spread suntan lotion on her back. Danny could feel the soft, warm skin glide through his fingers, smooth like butter. As he worked his way down the small of her back she whispered, "don't forget my legs" in that exotic lisp of hers. Forget her legs! He couldn't keep his eyes of them, long and lean and.....

_b-l-a-a-a-a-a-a-t! _

Danny sat up with a start, heart pounding from the sudden alarm. Was it the Fenton House Defenses? Or the Ghost Zone Portal? Civil Defense? The Coast Guard... Danny shook his head. It couldn't be the coast guard, they didn't live anywhere near water.

_b-l-a-a-a-a-a-a-t! _

"Oh!" Danny sighed in relief. It was his cellphone. But who would be calling him at -- he looked at his screen on the phone -- midnight?

"Tucker, figures." he groaned and flipped the phone open.

"This had better be good, Tuck. I was having The Dream."

"The one with Paulina and..."

"Yes. So what's so important that you had to call me in the middle of the night?"

"I got a call from T'keisha."

"Good for you. Now can I go back to sleep? I think if hurry I can still dream about oiling her toes."

"Danny, this is important."

"So is The Dream."

"T'keisha was attacked by a ghost."

"So what do you want me to do, fly down there and chase it away?" Danny asked crossly, his dreams of Paulina fading away.

Tucker hesitated for a moment before saying "Sort of."

Something about his answer troubled Danny. "Tucker, are we alone?" he asked.

"I - uh - have T'keisha on two-way..."

"Hi, Danny" a faraway voice called.

"Tucker, warn me when you do stuff like that. I almost ...you know." Danny had a secret that only Tucker and one other knew about, that Danny Fenton was also Danny Phantom, the ghost boy hero.

"Sorry, man. You never gave me a chance to explain."

Danny grunted into the phone "So what's going on?" he finished.

T'keisha recounted her attack, Tucker filling in details he's obviously heard before.

Danny was sitting on the edge of his bed by the time she finished. He stifled a yawn then asked. "Let me see if I've got this straight. Tucker sent you an E-Mail..."

"No," Tucker interrupted, "she got what she thought was an email from me. But I hadn't sent her one today."

"T'keisha?" Danny prompted.

"It looked like an letter from Tucker. I didn't really look at the routing information but it had the right starting server."

"And you checked it with two different anti-virus programs and it passed both of them?"

"Uh-uh."

"But when you opened it a ghost tried to come out of your computer/"

"My laptop, right."

"Green, skin, angular face, high, grating voice, calling itself 'Technus'?"

"Right. It liked to speak of itself in the third person."

"That sounds like Technus all right. Are you sure it called itself Technus 0.7?" Danny asked

"Yes. That was weird because who would send a beta version of a program?"

"More like an alpha version," Tucker interjected.

"Either way, this is wrong. Technus is running version 2.0 and the last I heard he was behind bars at Walker's Prison in the Ghost Zone."

"You've heard of this ghost before?" T'keisha asked, incredulously.

"Um, uh, yeah," Danny answered. "We've run into it a couple times." Danny didn't like letting people know that he fought ghosts like his parents did, for a number of reasons, the chief of which was that he didn't want people thinking Danny Fenton and Danny Phantom in the same sentence too often. The other reason was that his parent's approach to ghost hunting was so psychotic that he didn't want to be associated with them.

"But it's gone now?"

"Uh-uh," T'keisha confirmed. "I guess. It tried getting out of my PDA but I threw that in the yard before calling you."

"Tuck, what do you want to me do?" Danny asked. "She's like a hundred miles away and I don't have a car."

"92.3 miles as the crow flies," Tucker corrected.

"The crow ain't flying and neither of us are old enough to drive."

"I thought we could borrow the Specter Speeder. It would be like, what, a half hour down. We could get back in plenty of time so you're parents wouldn't even know it was gone."

"No can do. We've borrowed the Specter Speeder so many times Dad's put a lock on it. "

"Oh." Tucker thought for a moment. "Let's call Sam, maybe she has some ideas."

"At this hour of the night, _you_ call her." Danny said.

"Whatever, but she won't get as mad at you as she would at me."

"No!"

Tucker plead for another couple minutes. Then Danny heard him pressing keys and after a moment a sleepy voice said "hello?"

Tucker quickly began telling her T'keisha's story, never pausing long enough to Sam for get in any questions. Danny was falling asleep during all this so it was with a jolt when someone asked "key or password?"

"What?"

"The Specter Speeder: key or password?" It was Sam. She sounded wide awake. Danny wondered how she did it.

"Why?"

"If it's a key then there's a spare under one of the fenders. If it's a password, the password is either 'Maddie' or 'Vladdie.' "

"How do you know these things?" Danny asked, astonished that Sam could guess his father's passwords so easily.

"Your father's many things, but subtle he's not." She continued. "You pick up Tucker and meet me on your front doorstep in - ah - twenty minutes." Sam hung up before Danny could object.

Danny got up, turned on the light. He looked around to make sure the room was presentable. Threw some old underpants in the hamper in the closet then reached inside himself somewhere and exerted the force that turned him from human to ghost. A band of light encircled his waist, split in two and quickly moved to head and toes. As the band passed his body twisted through fourth dimensional space, turning his flesh and blood and DNA inward while bringing out the ectoplasma fused to those molecules. His dark hair turned snow white, his eyes began glowing green. A black jumpsuit with white details covered his body. His legs faded away into a smoky tail.

Danny Phantom leaped through the wall of his bedroom and soared off towards Tucker's house. Only to return a moment later and revert back to human form. He dragged on his jeans and a shirt. While Danny Phantom was always dressed for business, Danny Fenton had been sleeping in his underwear!

Sam was waiting for them at the front of the Fentonworks building when Danny got back with Tucker. She was a slender, attractive girl with long black hair tied up in a ponytail. She was wearing a dark colored cropped T-Shirt and a green and black plaid skirt over purple tights. Heavy Doc Marten boots were on her feet, a small moped leaned against the handrail.

As long as he was touching them Danny could extend his invisibility or intangibility or weightlessness to other people. He had Tucker gripped in one hand and took Sam's hand in the other and floated them all through the wall of the building and down into the Fenton's laboratory.

The lab was a large, messy, cluttered room, dominated on the far wall by an eight-sided gate, sealed with heavy metal doors. To the left was a vehicle about the side of a full size van, but streamlined somewhat like an Airstream trailer. It sat on rails facing a long, dark tunnel.

Danny landed by the passenger door and pointed to the lock. It was a nine-button keypad. There was no printing on the keys but it was easy enough to guess the keys corresponded to the same three letter groups as on a telephone dial.

Sam looked at the keys for a moment, then tried opening the door. A digitized voice said "password required." Slowly and thinking carefully she typed in 8-5-1-3-3-4-3, which spelled out "Vladdie." "Incorrect password" the digitized voice announced. "Actually I'm, relieved by that," she said when she explained when she had just typed in. I'd hate to think that your Dad so likes Vlad Masters as to use his name for a password.

Sam then typed in 6-2-3-3-4-3, which spelled out "Maddie," Danny's mother's name. "Password accepted." the voice announced and the door popped open of its own accord.

Danny set about turning on circuits and warming up the engines.

"Hey, Danny," Tucker asked, "what kind of stuff you got that we can take along?"

Danny got out of the pilot's seat and joined his friend looking at the piles of gadgets on the work bench.

"Well....." Danny drawled. "We've got a couple blasters here. A Jack-o-Nine Tails.... Oh, here's theFenton Net'apult. Let's take that since Sam's not big on frying ghosts. Oh, and a thermos."

"I was thinking more along the lines of analyzers, actually." Tucker said even as he was picked up the various weapons Danny had pointed out.

"Oh.... uh...Here's a Fenton-Finder. I think I fixed this one to not find me. And . . . .and . . . .oh, here's just the thing. The Fenton Multicorder. It does twenty different forms of spectral analysis."

"Does it play MP3s?"

"No."

"Not much of a 'corder is it? Know how to operate it?"

"Not really."

"You really should take more of an interest in this stuff Danny, since you're using it more than your parents."

Danny just grunted irritatedly.

They carried the pile of gear into the Specter Speeder where they found that Sam had finished the pre-flight checklist and had turned on the tunnel lights. She was sitting in the pilot's seat and didn't get up when Danny moved to take her place.

"Come on, let me flight it." She pleaded. "You and Tucker are always grabbing the pilots seat. I never get a turn."

"You don't know how to fly it," Tucker unwisely blurted out. He gained a long cold glare for Sam.

Danny, a bit more cautious, asked, "Know where we're going?"

"I've got East Gratiot locked in on the GPS. Tucker will have to direct us from there."

Unable to think of any other objections, Danny said, "OK, let's do this thing."

He cringed as Sam, spun the Speeder on the launching carriage so that it faced into the tunnel and pressed forward on the steering yoke. The Speeder rolled down the tunnel accelerating at a fast but smooth pace. Abruptly their were hurled into the air as the Speeder exited from the tunnel in the Fenton's back yard. The above ground swimming pool that covered the exit swung out of the way as they left and sank back down covering up the tunnel made as soon as they were clear. The water in the pool splashed on the grass and fresh water was being pumped back in by the time they cleared the top of the Fentonwork's building and turned east. Sam pushed the throttles forward and the Speeder leaped forward. Danny had to admit she was operating the Speeder as well as he did. Seeing the smile on her face he wondered if she would ever let him drive again!

Sam swung the Speeder around so it pointed in the right direction. She and Tucker talked in low voices about distances, air speed, ETAs and where to land. With nothing to offer to the conversation Danny sat down in one of the back seat and flipped the back rest down. Sleepiness washed over him. He tried to re-enter his dream about Paulina but for some reason her delicate little, pink toes kept turning into hairy, callused things with ugly, twisted yellow toenails that somehow he knew belonged to Mr. Lancer, his high school home room teacher. Not that he had ever seen Mr. Lancer's bare feet, but that's how it is with dreams.

Danny half-opened his eyes and glanced around the inside of the Speeder. Everything was as before. Sam was flying low to the ground so as not to appear on FAA radar. It was pitch dark outside so the large windshield was more like a curved mirror. Danny drifted back to sleep thinking about Technus.

The self-proclaimed Master of all Things Technical was big on boasting about his accomplishments and plans but most of the time wasn't very clever with his schemes. He could possess machinery and make it do things that ordinarily it couldn't, like attack people. He could reform lots of machinery into giant robotic bodies and he could reside in electronic devices, even leap from one to another if there was the potential for an electrical current. But it had never traveled as an E-mail before or acted like some kind of spectral spam.

Then there was the weird way he kept calling out that he was version 0.7. Danny had learn enough from Tucker to know that incomplete versions of a program were often zero-point-something, indicating that they were still in development, released in alpha version to get feedback from users. But ghosts, even Technus, were unique beings -- entities. They didn't come in versions or duplicates, multiple copies, whatever. The last time he had fought with the ghost, Technus had been calling himself Technus 2.0, claiming to have learned from his earlier battles with Danny. How could there be a beta version of Technus when he was already at 2.0? Danny would really like to have a long, uninterrupted talk with Technus. The Technus he knew to be locked away in Walker's Ghost Zone prison. Walker was the ghost of all prison wardens and he had "issues" with Danny, had even invaded the human world once to try to capture him. Trying to sneak into Walker's prison to talk to Technus did not seem like a healthy idea. Danny hoped they could solve this problem without having to go into the Ghost Zone.

Danny was finally falling asleep when Tucker shouted out "There it is! That has to be T'keisha's house."

Chapter Two

Danny got up and walked into the cockpit and looked out through the large windshield. A half moon aided a few weak streetlights to illuminate a dingy street of worn out older houses, mostly three stories high and so crowded together that only a couple feet separated them. There were large stoops in the front and an alley along the back with small garages. Danny was used to streets lined with three and four story brownstone apartment buildings. Even the FentonWorks had been one until his parents had converted it into their laboratory. Danny wasn't sure what to make of this. It wasn't the picket-fenced TV-world of Mayberry, RFD and not quite the urbanity he was used to.

Tucker pointed to a pocket-size playground on the corner a block over from T'keisha's house. Sam swooped in under some tall oaks and parked the Spector Speeder in the shadows behind a small toolshed.

They were still a half block from her house when T'keisha, sitting on her stoop, saw them She leaped up and rushed up to Tucker grabbing him in an embrace that nearly bowled him over. She seemed to be saying "oh, god" over and over but perhaps Danny was mis-hearing her.

After a minute, when it didn't appear that T'keisha was going to let go, Danny leaned over to Sam and said, a bit loudly, "I think we're going to need the 'jaws of life' to extract Tuck."

She slapped him hard on the shoulder in reply.

"Make yourself useful and haul that gear to the back of their house and sweep it for ecto-traces," Sam suggested after a moment.

Danny looked peevishly as Tucker and T'keisha and picked up the knapsacks of instruments Tucker had been carrying and stamped down the street. He had barely left when T'keisha finally let go of Tuck and turned to hug Sam. "No hugs for the ghost boy," Danny growled, walking between houses to the dark square of grass and barbeque equipment that constituted T'keisha's backyard.

Danny liked to think that his ghost sense could tell him if a ghost was anywhere near, though technically it only warned him when he was about to be attacked by a ghost. Since he rarely met a ghost who wasn't trying to kill him, his confusion on this point it was understandable. His ghost sense told him there was no ghosts around.

There was a small light over the back door offering the only illumination in the yard. It revealed a small patio of cement paving blocks, a wood picnic table and a barbeque grill covered in a tarp weighed down with a couple bricks. Danny dumped his armload on the picnic table and sorted through them until he found the Fenton Finder. He flipped it on, and changed a couple setting for a high response reading. Waving the Fenton Finder around the yard produced no response.

Danny smiled -- his senses had been proved "right" again -- then frowned. If the ghost wasn't here -- where was it?

The Fenton Finder was rudely snatched out of his hands, followed by a couple clicks as the instrument was reset and then a loud _yelp!_

"Sorry, dude," Tucker said. "I thought you said you'd fixed this?"

"I did, you leave the Alpha channel on 3 so you won't detect m-- oh, hi, T'keisha."

The tall girl was still holding on to one of Tucker's arms as if her life depended on it.

"But I've got to go to 4 for the high gain sensitivity!" Tucker insisted.

"No, no, don't use 4. I couldn't 'fix' that. Stay on 3 and shift the epsilon to 8."

"But 8 degrades the readings. That's why I need to switch Alpha to 4..."

"Tucker, you're not listening to me. You can't use 4! Look, tell you what. I'll go back to the Specter Speeder and get a couple flashlights because it kind of dark out here. You can use 4 while I'm gone."

He sprinted away.

Sam came up to Tucker and T'keisha. "What was that all about?" she asked.

"Danny didn't fix the Fenton Finder," Tucker complained.

"Yes he did. I helped him test it."

"It yelped when I switched it to Alpha 4."

"Well, of course it did. There was nothing Danny could do about that. You just have to stay off Alpha 4."

"But I need to use Alpha 4 to find any ghosts that might be lingering around here."

"You can't! Stay on Alpha 3." Sam insisted.

"What's the problem?" T'keisha asked.

"Nothing," said Sam

"Nothing," said Tucker.

"Do you guys always act this weird around ghost?" T'keisha asked.

"We're not acting weird," Tucker answered.

"Danny's not here so I think we can use channel 4 for a moment," Sam observed.

A small video screen lit up on the scanner. The display looked like a compact weather map with multiple contour lines, each with compass headings and value reading marked off in multiple colors, +3 on one line -7 on another. There looked to be a high pressure region off to the west, assuming this was a weather map. West was the park there the Specter Speeder and Danny Fenton/Phantom was. Closer in, the field seemed to be flat.

Tucker changed another switch. The display seemed to swell in close and the seeming flat field surrounding the house erupted into a patchy turbulence. One patch 'hotter' than the others centered on an upstair room with an open window. Tucker was slowly sweeping the Finder along the length of the house and every time he came to that room the readings for whatever it was that the finder was sensing went up.

"That's my bedroom," T'keisha whispered, confused.

"Where you were attacked by a ghost," Tucker said. "Those readings are ecto-plasmic residue. A ghost was there but the readings now never go beyond green -6. That means there's no ghost there now."

Tucker turned and waved the Finder around the backyard. "You said you threw a PDA out here?"

"Yeah. That creepy ghost was trying to strangle me from it. How can a ghost get into a machine? I thought they only haunted people and houses?"

"I don't know," Tucker said. "Maybe Mr. Fenton, Danny's father, does; he's the ghost expert. Maybe he has a theory about this. All I know is that Technus does and can invade machinery and use them to attack people. But, really I don't see any evidence of him still being around. Wait! what's that?"

A small flicker of yellow had appeared on the screen. Tucker moved into the darkness, following the indications on the Finder. After a minute, "I found your PDA!" he shouted.

"Leave it. Just leave it! I'll throw it away in the morning!"

"And waste a perfectly good machine?"

"It's got a ghost in it."

"Not any more," Tucker explained. "See, it's a minus-one yellow, meaning a strong former ecto-trace but if there was still a ghost in there it would have been a plus-one or higher."

"I don't ever want to see it again."

"But T'keisha...."

"Why don't you hold on it for a while, Tucker," Sam suggested, "and if nothing more happens then you can give it back."

"Sure. T'keisha?"

"I guess that would be OK. You're not afraid of being attacked by a ghost?"

"Happens all the time," Tucker boasted, 'but I know how to take care of them."

Sam got something caught in her throat. After a moment she asked, "what about your laptop?"

"I threw it out here, too. Papa said I had to get it fixed by tomorrow but I, like, broke it in half to stop that ghost. I don't want that machine in my house ever again.

"I want to see the email T'keisha got. There may be a clue where it came from or who sent it." Tucker said, adjusting the Finder again and sweeping it around the back yard.

"Hurry up," Sam whispered to Tucker. "Danny won't stay away much longer, find that laptop and switch off Alpha-4 becfore he comes back and sets it off."

Tucker found the laptop by tripping over it. He looked at the fragments speculatively. "Now why didn't the Finder pick this up? It had far greater exposure to ectoplasm than the PDA?" He noticed a swelling pink hue entered the edge of the Finder's display. A contour line read +23. Hastily he switched the Finder to Alpha channel 3 just as Danny rounded the corner of the house, holding a couple flashlights in his hands.

"I got the flashlights," Danny called out loudly.

"Shhhh!" T'keisha hissed. Don't wake up my parents!"

"Sorry." But he wasn't. He had meant to alert Tucker that he was returning and had done so the only way how. He didn't like being yelled at, even if it was in a harsh whisper. More and more he was disliking this mission.

"So what did I miss?" Danny asked.

"We found her PDA and laptop," Sam filled him in. Tucker had brought the pieces of the laptop over to the picnic table and laid it out in the dim glow of the back door light.

"Wow. You really did a number on it," Danny observed. "I didn't think you could bent a laptop case in half like that."

"We might be able to straighten the case," Tucker said, "but the motherboard is split and there's no way we can fix that. Too many broken circuits."

"I don't want it back," T'keisha insisted.

"But your father said..."

"I know..." she wailed.

"Let's worry about that later," Sam offered. She gave T'keisha a quick hug.

Tucker reached into one of the many pockets on the leg of his pants and pulled out a thick, oblong device. It had the word "Fenton" printed along the side. From one of its many slots Tucker extracted a tiny philips head screwdriver and attacked the back of the laptop. Danny aimed his flashlight on where Tucker was working without being asked. After removing a half dozen screws Tucker flipped the screwdriver back into the body of the Fenton Multi-Tool then pulled out a small chisel. He placed this along the seam between upper and lower halves of the case and gave it a resolute smack. The case split in two. Tucker set the upper section with the keyboard aside and began unscrewing a insulating board over some lower pieces. He took the flashlight from Danny and shone it into certain crannies.

"What do you see?" T'keisha asked over Tucker's shoulder. She was still holding Sam hand but curiosity was overriding her fear of ghosts.

"Doesn't look like there was any electric arcing or fire damage," Tucker replied. "Any idea where Technus got his power, Danny?"

"Nope. But then I've never figured out where I -- ghosts -- get their powers. It just seems to be there."

Tucker handed back the flashlight and unscrewed another thin metal plate and fished out a small rectangular box maybe two inches by three inches by a quarter inch high. A couple cables hooked it to the laptop. Tucker pulled the cables free and pushed the gutted laptop out of the way. From another pocket on his trousers Tucker pulled his PDA and from another pocket a couple of jumpers. He started attaching them to the object on the table.

"What are you do?" T'keisha cried in a harsh whisper.

"I'm hooking up your hard drive to my PDA. I want to read that e-mail."

"Are you crazy? It's got a virus. It'll infect your machine!" T'keisha screamed, then clamped her hand over her mouth and turned to see if a light came on in her parent's bedroom.

"It'll be alright, T." Tucker answered. I'm just going to read the drive with a hexeditor. A virus is a computer program. It can't do anything unless it gets executed, and just reading the characters in the email won't execute anything."

"What kind of program creates a ghost?" T'keisha whispered back. "This is supernatural stuff, the rules we're familiar with don't apply."

"Deja vu." Danny whispered to Sam. She was standing the other side of T'Keshia and couldn't reach to smack Danny like she was tempted.

"Hey, power," Tucker said, reading some response off his PDA. " 'Contact has been made.' " He quoted from an SF show. "Cool, Linux. T, you're a geeks, geek."

"Thanks, I think"

"What's your mail program?"

"Pine"

"An oldie but a goodie."

"You're not going to read all my old e-mails are you?"

"Not unless you want me to.

Danny was filled with rude sarcastic quips he was dying to try out but when he saw T'keisha slide her arm over Tucker's shoulder he swallowed hard and said nothing.

"Here we are, last e-mail in the queue. Header looks properly formed. That is my IP address. Wonder how they got that...."

"Whois." T'keisha said in reply. Danny and Sam looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders.

"Oh, look here," Tucker said pointing to a string of number amid a stack of number strings. "That's an anonymizer site."

"There's another," T'keisha added, pointing to another string of numbers.

"Someone wanted to make sure no one could trace this e-mail back to them."

"Technus?" Danny asked.

"He's never been this devious," Sam pointed out.

"I don't think you can call anyone who sends an e-mail through two different anonymizer sites and still fails to scrub his backtrail very smart." Tucker scoffed.

"So you can find out where this e-mail was sent from?" Danny asked.

"Boucou Bucks at Boucou Bucks dot Gee Aitch Zee. What's GHZ, Ghana?"

"Nah, that's GH. Greenland?

"Greater Holy Zeeland?" Danny offered.

"Get serious, Danny."

"What so important about 'dot Gee Aitch Zee' anyway?" Danny asked.

"Internet addresses outside the US generally use a two letter abbreviation for the country of origin." T'keisha explained. "So whoever this Boucou Bucks is, he resides in GHZ."

"But there's no nation abbreviated GHZ and a three letter abbreviation is all wrong," Tucker finished.

"What about Boucou Bucks? Ever hear of him?" Danny asked. "Tuck, Sam, T'keisha?"

They all shook their heads. "Never heard of either," Danny continued. "I can query the Fenton mainframe when we get back but I'm guessing we'll turn up a blank, too. I don't recalled Technus ever mentioning a Boucou Bucks during any of the times we're fought him."

"I was hoping we could find a clue in the header," Tucker groused. Maybe there'll be a clue in the programming code." He tapped a part of the screen of his PDA, causing the text displayed to scroll down.

"Do you think this is wise?" Danny asked.

"Sure, what could go wr----"

"Foolish mortals, I, Technus, Master of all Things Technological......" A grainy image of the ghost appeared on the screen of Tucker's PDA. "Am here to take over all your computers. Alll your Base Are Belong to us. Surrender now. Resistance is futile." Slowly his faced squeezed its way out of the screen of Tucker's PDA into the real world."

"Not again," T'keisha gasped, and fainted.

A bright ring of light sprang from around Danny's waist, split into two and rapidly raced towards his head and feet. As it passed Danny changed from jeans and T-shirt into a black jump-suit with a large stylized "D" on the chest, his hair turned pure white, his eyes became glowing green. He leaped to wrestle with the ghost as it crawled out of Tucker's PDA. The ghost broke free of the device and the two combatants soared into the sky.

Tucker had jumped to catch T'keisha as she fell and was pulled down on top her. Now Sam was jabbing him in the side yelling (in a whisper) "Get Off! Get Off Get Off! You're suffocating her." Tucker rolled onto the grass and sat up. "What'll we do?"

"Help me pull her under this picnic table. She'll be safest there."

After they had pushed and shoved her under the table as best they could, Sam reached for the knapsack of weapons they'd brought along. Tucker paused to pull down T'keisha's T-shirt which had ridden up.

"Shouldn't we stay here and try to protect her?" he asked.

Sam was busily assembling the Fenton Net'apult. "The best thing we can do for her is go help Danny keep Technus from coming back here"

"But shouldn't --"

"Come on! Grab something and lets go." Sam took off running around the house. Tucker grabbed the first thing he could find in the knapsack and followed. He caught up with Sam on the sidewalk in front of T'keisha's house. "Which way did Danny go?" she asked.

Sparks flying up in the night sky from an exploding transformer caught Tucker's eye. "There!" he pointed.

The battle was a couple blocks over, near the convenience store where T'keisha had first called them. The area was in total darkness now as powerlines torn free from the transform whipped through the air trying to snag Danny. But the phantom ghost boy maneuvered easily around the slow wires.

Technus was dressed in a pale blue trenchcoat with a green belt. He face was blue, his hair a vast mane of white, long green gloves covered his hands. All seemed made up of angular blocky planes, as if he was, indeed, some kind of preliminary Technus design. And like the early Technus, the one Danny fought before he came back as Technus 2.0, Technus was loudly announcing his plans before doing them.

"Your flying is good, foolish mortal, but my technology is better! Technology will always triumph over natural abilities!"

Danny blasted one of the menacing powerlines, cutting it off from the electric pole it was attached to. The wire withered like a snake with its head cut off until it touched the ground. Suddenly it became just an ordinary coil of copper wire. "Less talk, more fighting!" Danny taunted, sending a blast of ectoplasm his way. With a squawk Technus awkwardly dodged the blast.

Sam and Tucker skidded to a halt and tried to find an opening with which to help, but Danny was moving around so fast that it was hard to something to blast without hitting him.

"Wow, Technus really is primitive," Tucker noted. I've seen better graphic on a Coleco game console."

"And he isn't doing the sorts of things he done before, like turning cars into robots or forming a giant robot body around himself." Sam added.

"Don't give him ideas!" Tucker hissed.

"We've got to do something to help Danny. What did you bring?"

Tucker held up a small, stylish tube of lipstick. The word "Fenton" was printed down the side.

"It's not your color," Sam dead panned.

"Hey, this is a very powerful blaster!"

"I know but it's disturbing how proficient you've become with lipstick. Don't let Dash Baxter see you using it or you'll never live it down."

"At least I'm doing something. What're you going to do with that Net'apult? This is Technus, he'll just use it to attack us." The Fenton Net'apult was a bazooka like device that launched a weighted net to capture fleeing ghosts. As a technological device Technus would be able to manipulate the net teleknetically.

"Not after I dose it with Fenton Ghost-Be-Gone. I figure he'll be unable to touch it with his techno ghost powers." The Goth girl had pulled an aerosol can out of her back pocket and was spaying goop into the mouth of her bulky weapon.

Sam left Tucker firing at other waving powerlines and snuck from one place of concealment to another, trying to get in close enough to Technus to use the Net'apult. She was beginning to reconsider her dislike for lethal, long-distance weapons when she saw an opening. Danny Phantom had acquired Technus's full attention through a series of close spaced blaster fire. The master of all things technical and mechanical was trying to levitate some trash cans to shield himself from the fire. Sam stepped out into the open, took careful aim and fired.

There was a loud _thump!_ as compressed gas shot four heavy balls out of four separate barrels. The light-weight ghost-proof net was pulled along, spreading open as the balls traveled diverging paths. Technus was just beginning to turn around at the sound when the net struck him, the balls whipping around, wrapping the net tightly about him.

The ghost seemed to flicker for a moment then disappeared, the net collapsed to the ground. Danny swopped in and unstrapped the Fenton Thermos strapped to his back but when he pointed it at where Technus 0.7 had been there was nothing for the Thermos to suck in.

"What happened? Where did Technus go?" He asked.

"Gone, man," Tucker muttered. "He just kind of derezzed and popped out."

"He died? Ghosts don't die, they're already dead." Danny was having trouble accepting what his friend was saying.

"It was like someone turned off a TV set, Danny," Sam contributed.

"Yeah, it was like this Technus was a hologram or something," Tucker said. "He wasn't really here and once he was caught in the ecto-net shorted out or something."

"You're saying I was fighting a hologram? I nearly got killed by a _picture_ of a ghost?"

"Dude, I don't know what just happened. All I know is that Technus was here but he ain't here now."

Danny shook his head and slung the Fenton Thermos back over his shoulder. He looked at Sam who shrugged her shoulders.

"Then I guess our work here is done," Danny mused. "So lets get the heck away before someone comes around asking questions. -- Where's T'keisha?"

Tucker refused to met Danny's eye.

"She fainted," Sam filled in. "We left her under the picnic table in her back yard."

"Don't sneer like that, Danny," Tucker suddenly spoke up. "She's had a long night. Not everyone is used to ghosts like you are."

"I didn't say anything!"

"Yeah, but I know that look of yours."

"What! What?"

They found T'keisha just beginning to stir when they returned. Tucker helped her get up and sit down on the picnic table bench while Danny busied himself with picking up their gear and stuffing it back into knapsacks.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Tucker's messing around spawned another Technus ghost. We killed it. It's gone." Danny snapped.

"You apparently fainted when the ghost appeared," Sam put in. Tucker was glaring at Danny but unsure what to say. "We figured you'd be safest under the table then went to help Danny, who had chased it out of your yard.

"Did it..."

"Cause damage and destruction?" Danny jumped in. "Oh yeah. The power's out for blocks around here."

"The electric company will say it was a transformer exploding that caused all the damage," Sam put in softly. "People are pretty good about refusing to believe in ghosts -- or ghost related damage." She was glaring at Danny, too, who seemed indifferent to her expression.

"We should be going," he said, picking up one of the packed bags of Fenton equipment. "We gotta get back before anymore notices that we took the Specter Speeder out."

"We've been here less than an hour," Sam objected. "We have plenty of time before your parents get up."

"I'd rather not take chances."

"What's your problem, dude," Tucker suddenly asked. "It's T'keisha, isn't it?"

"No it's not that at all."

"Then what is it?"

Danny had no answer.

"Look, I'm sorry," T'keisha apologized, "I shouldn't have called you in to this. I should have handled this on my own."

"Don't be sorry," Sam said. "You were in over your head, as some butthead--" she glanced at Danny -- "would admit if he wasn't being such a jerk. We were glad to help. You're our friend. You can call us anytime, day or night--"

"Day would be better," Danny interrupted.

"Ignore him."

"T'keisha," Tucker put in, holding out a PDA to her. "This is my back-up PDA, it's never had contact with a ghost or anything, so it should be safe to use. If I had a back-up laptop I'd lend you it. This is the best I can do. I'm going to take that hard drive from your computer back with us and play around with it some more in Danny's parent's lab. They've got some specter isolation chambers that will prevent any more break-outs like tonight's. I'll dub everything off it I can that tests 100% ghost-free and send you a new hard drive."

The girl wrapped him in her long arms and kissed him.

After a long time she let Tucker go and gave Sam a quick hug. "Thanks for everything," she said.

"Call if anything else weird happens."

'Come on," Danny called, walking away before T'keisha could hug him. Reluctantly Sam grabbed another of the knapsacks. Tucker picked up the last bag. "Wanna see the Specter Speeder?" he asked. They walked hand in hand down the street and into the park.

Danny already had the craft unlocked, the bag stored in a corner and was strapped into the pilot's seat running the pre-flight check when Tucker and T'keisha got there. Foley insisted on giving T'keisha a quick tour of the vehicle before another round of hugs and T'keisha left. Danny hit the "door close" button and pulled back on the yoke, levitating the speeder rapidly into the sky. Checking the bearing against the GPS system he eased the speeder forward, quickly leaving the darkened circle of city behind them.

For a time they traveled in silence, Sam in the co-pilot's seat and Tucker in one of the passenger seats. Finally Sam could restrain herself no longer. "You were a real jerk back there."

"No I wasn't."

"This isn't a debate Danny Fenton. You were a jerk and there's no excuse for it."

Danny said nothing. After a time Sam sighed and asked, "You're not even going to defend yourself?"

"You said it wasn't a debate."

"You owe Tucker an apology for your rude behavior tonight. You really owe T'keisha an apology but at least you could apologize to Tuck."

"For what? For getting up in the middle of the night, leaving the house without my parents permission, for stealing the Specter Speeder, for nearly getting killed by a crazy ghost, for putting my friend's lives in danger from said crazy ghost? Right, I need to apologize to Miss Faints-a-lot."

"O-o-o-o-o-o!" Sam growled. "That's it? You're being a jerk because T'keisha fainted? Lots of people faint."

"You've faced lots of ghosts worse than Technus and you've never fainted."

"This isn't about me, Danny. And don't think that just because I didn't faint doesn't mean I didn't feel like fainting. You know, if I didn't know better I'd think you're just jealous of Tucker having a girlfriend."

"What's that supposed to mean. I'm glad he has a girlfriend. I guess she's a girlfriend. More power to him ."

"Wow, you are jealous! That was a classic case of denial."

"I get enough of that psychology crap from Jazz, don't you go there as well."

"I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you, Danny. You're as transparent as...as...as a ghost. You're mad because Tucker has a girlfriend and you don't."

"I -- don't?"

"Well, uh..." Sam stopped speaking. She considered her words carefully, rejecting many things she could possible say here. There were so many things she could say here, any of which would be absolutely true and yet would lead off in directions she wasn't ready to face. In the end she decided to punt. "From all the jokes you make about Jazz's dates I sort of thought you were kind of down on all that stuff."

"Jazz--" Danny breathed, glad to talk about something else. "I do not see what she sees in those guys she goes out with. Sometimes I think she's just researching the mind-set of the adolescent neanderthal."

Sam let that ride for a while.

"Try to be happy for Tuck," she said finally.

"Yeah. I know." The lights of Amity Park were beginning to glow in the distance. "You do realize there were two instance of Technus 0.7 generated tonight. We destroyed only one. I wonder what happened to the other one. I'm afraid we're going to have to steal back there again to find it."

"What? Oh, lord, no!"

"And what's the deal with Technus 0.7. Technus is a ghost not a computer program. He may called himself Technus 2.0 but that's more of an advertising slogan. He may have chanced his costume but he hadn't really changed himself. There's no Technus 1.0 running around besides 2.0, so why is there a 0.7?"

"Maybe you should talk to Technus," Tucker offered from back of the speeder.

"You heard...."

"Everything."

"Damn!" Danny muttered.

"I don't much care to be discussed in the third person."

"I'm sorry Tucker," Sam said, "I really didn't think you could overhear back there."

"Well, I guess it's better than having you two talk about me behind my back. But, Danny I don't want you ever bad mouthing T'keisha ever again."

"I'm sorry, Tuck. It won't happen again." Danny was surprised by his friends anger, something new for him.

"Just because she doesn't react to ghosts the way you like doesn't mean she's a bad person."

"I never said that."

"Or is weak."

"Ok."

"Or ... or..." Tucker lapsed into silence, unable to finish his sentence.

After a while Sam said, "You know, talking to Technus does seem like a good idea."

"He's in Walker's Ghost Zone Prison, and you know Walker has it in for me," Danny said. "That would be a pretty big risk just to talk to a ghost who doesn't make much sense at the best of times."

"That's it!" Tucker exclaimed.

"What?"

" 'Gee Aitch Zee' -- 'Ghost Zone.' Boucou Bucks was sending from the Ghost Zone. No wonder he could send a ghost encrypted as an email attachment. Dude, you've got to talk to Technus. He'll either know this Boucou Bucks or know how he's able to send email between dimensions."

"Why? We stopped the ghost. We've secured the hard drive. What more can go wrong? I'm tired of fighting ghosts. I just want to sleep in till noon, do some skate boarding in the park and enjoy what's felt of the summer before we go back to school."

"We all do," Sam said. "But what if this was just a trial run? What's to say that Boucou Bucks isn't planning to spam the entire world. Six billion Technus 0.7s, I don't even want to think about it."

"A Spam ghost?" Danny echoed. "I get a hundred spams a day. I don't want to have to wrestle each one down before deleting it. Ok, we'll go see Technus, but not today. I'm bushed."

end.


	2. Chapter 2

Viral Attack - II - Dot Com Bust-Out

Danny Fenton was sprawled on the top edge of a small ridge over-looking a largish square building dominating a small island floating deep within the ghost zone. Sam and Tucker were beside him. He was squinting through a small rectangular box with the inevitable word "Fenton" stenciled on its side. Danny was fiddling with a number of knobs that projected from the side. After a moment, with a snarl, he cast it to the ground.

"Can't see a think through the Fentonoculars."

"Try these," Sam offered, handing him a large pair of binoculars. A Swiss name was discretely embossed on it.

Danny put them to his eyes, adjusted the focus and gasped when the image snapped into perfect focus. It seemed as it he was hovering scant feet above Warden Walker's ghost prison. Uniformed guards floated along the walkway on the top of the prison walls. Watchtowers built into each of the four corners of the wall were manned with more ghosts, armed with some kind of heavy blaster weapon. Inside the walls were a large exercise field filled with a small number of shackled ghosts (so they wouldn't try to fly away) and a larger number of guards, each armed with a glowing truncheon. Walker didn't trust anyone, especially ghosts he had seized and incarcerated in his prison. As far as Danny could tell, since there was no government, laws, or overarching authority in the ghost zone. Walker's prison existed by his fiat, and his prisoners were as much kidnap victims as spectral miscreants.

After watching the guards patrol for a few minutes Danny sighed and handed the glasses back to Sam. "He's got overlapping patrols everywhere, Danny explained. "There's no way I can sneak in over the top."

"What if we take the Specter Speeder," Tucker suggested. "We could drive through the walls, grab Technus and be out of there before Walker knew what hit him." It was a curious property of the Ghost Zone that things from the material world could pass through walls and such as easily as ghostly things could in the material world.

"We don't know where Technus is being held," Danny replied., "It's a bit hard to do a 'smash and grab' when we don't know where to grab."

Danny rolled on his back, pausing a moment to look at Sam. He was having trouble dealing with how she was dressed.

Instead of her usual dark skirt and tights Sam was wearing a pair of baggy camo pants printed in overlapping splotches of purple, grey and white. Her top was a tight sleeveless men's Tee, also printed in purple, gray and white splotches and her long, black hair was tucked up in a baseball cap of the same design. Her usual black boots stood out in sharp contrast to the rest of her outfit. When he can gone to pick her up in the park that morning he had walked right past her at first.

"Danny!" she had called indignantly.

"Sam?"

"What?"

"You look....different."

"What, I can't change my clothes once in a while?"

"No, no, it's not that. It's just...so different."

"You don't like it?" Sam got up and started towards the patch of dense foliage Danny used for changing into Danny Phantom.

"It's so...bright," Danny lamely offered, following Sam into the concealing brush. "I thought Goths likely only dark things."

"Well.... purple is dark, and it has gray, too. Gray is very Goth because it's neither one or the other, you know. It's a conflicted color."

"Color has conflicts?"

"I am thinking of staining some of the fabric black; tone down some of the whiteness." She turned around to face Danny. "But I can't believe you didn't recognize me. Am I that predictable in what I wear? Or don't you look beyond the clothes people wear and look at them in the face?"

That was a bad question to ask in a tight T-shirt, Danny hastily moved his eyes to hers.

"I was thinking about how we're going to get in to talk to Technus," he mumbled, transforming into Danny Phantom. He took her hand, made them both invisible and flew off to the FentonWorks.

***

Danny slide down the slope a bit before standing up and walking the rest of the way down to the Specter Speeder. He didn't want to risk the chance that the guards on the prison wall might see them. The other two got up and followed.

Danny was sitting at a tiny breakfast table in the back of the speeder, doodling on a pad a paper when they arrived. Sam could see where he had sketched in a view of the prison with its watchtowers and walkways. Danny wasn't a good artist but she could figure out what he was getting at. She slip into a chair beside him, Tucker took the one opposite. Danny started adding an image of the Specter Speeder hurtling towards a large wooden castle-like gate. After an awkward moment Tucker suggested, "We could dress up like a couple of guards and pretend we're delivering you to the prison. That would get you in at least."

"That only works in movies because it's funny." Sam argued.

"Neither of you could pass for ghosts. You're too...substantial." Danny said without looking up. He was adding speed lines to his picture. After a moment he threw down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. He closed his eyes in thought.

"Tuck's idea might work," he said, finally.

"Dressing up like guards?" Sam asked in disbelieve.

"No, the smash and grab. Only not with the Speeder." He leaned forwards. "Danny Phantom can't walk through walls here in the Ghost Zone, but Danny _Fenton_ can. So I'm going fly around to an unobserved part of the prison wall, change into my normal self and just walk in."

"What are we supposed to do in all this?" Tucked asked. Sam just scowled disagreeably.

"Nothing. Once I get in I'll sneak around, passing through walls as needed until I find Technus, have a little talk with him and get back out. If I'm not out in two hours..."

"One hour." Sam insisted.

"...OK, one hour, then you come in with the Speeder and get me. I'll have on a pair of Fenton Phones so you can track me."

"Woohoo!" Tucker shouted.

"What makes you think you can do all this without running into Walker. No only does he have it for you for various past reasons, but I'm sure that sneaking into his prison is a violation."

"You got a better idea?"

"No. But I don't think this is a good one either. Danny, is this something worth risking your life about?"

Danny glanced at Sam but couldn't meet her eyes. "I don't want a million spam Technuses running around the world."

"I'm sure we can stop them without breaking into Walker's prison."

"Sam, I gotta do this. I've got to know where these viruses are coming from."

"Girl, you are not giving Danny enough credit for what he can do."

"Tucker, don't ever called me 'girl' again." Sam snapped.

"But you are!"

"And you're a boy but I _never_ calll you that. It's demeaning. I don't want to hear it again."

Tucker looked at Danny for support but found his friend as confused as he was. "But that's how my people speak."

"'Your people?' You mean other geeks?" Danny laughed.

"Other ghost fighters?" Sam added. "Sorry, I get a little touchy on the 'girl' thing. Like I'm not supposed to have ideas or opinions and have to defer to 'The Man' all the time."

"Well, T'Keisha likes it when I call her 'girl'."

"Does she, really?" Sam asked, quietly

"Heck, I don't know."

"You guys can work out your issues while I'm gone. I want to get this over with while I still have my nerve up." Danny got up and walked out of the speeder. As he passed through the door, a bright ring of light sprang up around his middle and raised to either end of his body, changing him from Danny Fenton into the ghostly Danny Phantom.

* * *

Danny flew low and away from the ridge overlooking Walker's prison. When he reached the edge of the small floating island they had landed on he swooped down and under. Different regions of the Ghost Zone were different. Some zones were all doors leading to other places or dimensions, others were filled with never-ending fog and some parts had floating islands. The islands were like icebergs floating in some existential sea. While the islands possessed gravity the region they floated in didn't. The islands drifted but only slightly and not as if they were in any kind of stream or current. Plants, trees, grasses grew on the islands. Sometimes animals lived there, too, but there was no sun and at the best of times the Ghost Zone was dingy. How the plants could grow there was just another mystery of the Ghost Zone. As Danny had noticed about his own ghost powers, they didn't seem to "come" from anywhere, they were just there.

Soon Danny had sailed past the deepest root of his island and the larger shadow of Walker's island came into view. He was sufficient below the plane of the surface of Walker's island that the walls of the prison could not be seen. Meaning, that the guards on the walls couldn't see him, either. Danny carefully looked around to be sure that the ghost warden hadn't done something as sensible as an aerial patrol covering the underside of his island. As far as he could tell the way was clear.

He jetted out into the void between the two islands. The trip was longer than he had expected, the way across vaster than it had appeared. But soon he found himself near the root of Walker's island. He swung around for a moment looking for the island he had left. He spotted it by a glint of light coming off the ridge running along the top. Sam's super-powerful binoculars, Maybe? Had they given themselves away earlier when they had peered at the prison with those powerful lenses? Was Walker already waiting for him to attempt a break in?

Danny remembered seeing a clump of bushes off to one side of the prison, near the edge of the island. That seemed the safest cover for coming over the edge of the island and landing on its surface. Or was the bushes _too_ convenient? Had Walker planted them there to lure escapees into a trap? Danny couldn't be sure but the doubts, the self-questioning was beginning to wear on his nerves.

He found the bushes where he thought they would be. Not as close to the wall as he would like, but close enough. He stared into them intently for a time before moving, but could not find anything resembling surveillance equipment.

Danny scrambled over the edge of the floating island and scurried into the shelter of the bushes. He worked his way to the front and squinted at the ghosts patrolling along the top of the prison. When he judged they were least likely to see him he sprinted towards the wall, pressing himself tight against it when he got there.

His heart was pounding in his chest like it would explode any minute. His mouth was dry, his breath short and hot. Taking a deep breath, Danny reached in and turned himself inside out. Rather than the black suited Danny Phantom, tousle-haired Danny Fenton leaned against the wall, in blue jeans and white Tee shirt.

Slowly he pushed against the wall and sank into it.

The wall was thicker than he expected. He had to take a long step before his head surfaced on the other side. He seemed to be in an disused storeroom. Dusty boxes and discarded furniture were scattered about the floor. Danny breathed a sigh of relief. So far so good.

He eased his head through the door and saw a hallway that joined another hallway maybe thirty feet beyond. He walked through the door into the hallway and quietly made his way to the end. The hall here was better lit. Open cells ran along the length of the hall. Apparently this was a disused portion of the prison. Danny was surprised that Walker hadn't just kept hauling prisoners in until the whole jail was filled.

Danny stepped into the brighter hallway and went down along it until he came to another intersection. He paused to listen for sounds before putting his head around the corner. He was about to move on when he heard a voice on the other side. Two voices. Coming his way.

"...rry the Rat is saying that Johnny 13 is planning an escape for tomorrow night or maybe the day after."

"Someone must be helping him," Walker replied. "We'll let him go and see who he flushes out. If it's one of my guards, they'll regret the day they ever decided to get bent."

The voices were nearly on him. To avoid detection Danny melted into the wall and fell out into an occupied prison cell. He spun around in alarm as a familiar voice purred, "Aren't you a sight for sore eyes. Say it, big boy, Say my name..."

"Ember?"

"Oh-h-h-h-h-h." the sound burbled from her mouth like the groan of a junkie weeks without a hit.

"Again. Say it again."

Danny saw her laying on a narrow cot hanging from the wall. The ghost musician was dressed in ugly prison orange, though she had found some way to personalize her outfit. It seemed to fit tightly about her bosom and waist, emphasizing a lush figure, the envy of any woman rock star. Her hair still floated in a glorious mane of white but the curlicue tattoo around her eyes looked tired and faded.. _She_ looked tired and faded.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"I could ask you the same, kid," she replied. "Don't make me beg, say my name."

"I will if you will tell me where I can find Technus."

"Why do you want that old blowhard when you can have me?" Ember oozed upright, swinging her legs over the side of her cot. She arched her back like a cat, stretching her uniform even more. A broad smile crossed her face but it looked cold, hungry.

"I gotta find out why he's sending spam email to my friends."

"Who needs friends when you can have me," she whispered in a husky voice.

"I like my friends. They remain my friends whether or not I say their names."

"But can they take you to Rock and Roll Heaven? Can they set your soul afire? Can they write a song that will have millions chanting your name? I can. I can do all that for you Danny Fenton, if you just say me name."

"So what do they call you around here that you're so desperate to have someone say your name?"

"To those pigs I'm inmate #647938. Who wants to be remembered by such an ugly name? Not me, not Ember McLain, the greatest rocker of all time!"

"I thought that was Elvis..."

"Don't toy with me boy! Say my name."

"Where can I find Technus?"

The ghost sighed and lay back on her cot.

"And you'll say my name if I tell you?"

"Yes. I promise."

"They keep him somewhere in the dungeons. I've never been down there so I can't help you more."

"How do I get to the dungeons?"

"My name..."

"Ember, how do I find the dungeon?"

"Oohhh. Aahh." She sighed again. Suddenly she sat up, bright eyed, energized. "Take me with you," she said, "and I'll show you the way."

Danny considered the offer. "Just tell me how to find the dungeon. I'll say your name again if you'll do that."

"Take me along."

"This is a jail break in, not a break out," Danny said firmly.

"Then why should I help you?"

"You know why, Em--"

The ghost looked expectantly at Danny waiting for him to finishing saying her name. But he let the syllable fade into the air.

"Don't leave me like this?"

"The longer I stay here the more likely that Walker will catch me. If you won't help me, I'll be on my way."

Danny turned and started to walk into the wall. He was about half way through when he heard her call, "wait."

Danny turned and found the ghost musician halfway across her cell, her hands were knotted, desperate.

He waited.

"Ok, turn left when you leave my cell, follow along the hall. It circles the whole prison. About half way around there will be signs for Cell Block H. There's a corridor there leading to an inner circle of cells. The corridor ends at some stairs leading down to the lower levels. The dungeons are down there somewhere. That's all I know. There are guards patrolling the hall outside but they don't come around too often."

"Thanks, Ember McLain."

The ghost sighed again. More powerfully than she had before.

"Thanks, kid. You don't know how good that feels. Hey, how about a kiss before you go. A little thank you for all your help?"

Ember was drifting close to Danny, her lips pursed to a kiss. She looked incredibly desirable, sensual. Danny didn't get kissed by beautiful women very often, and though Ember was a ghost, well, she was every bit a woman ghost. He was starting to lean in towards her for the kiss when he remembered that she _was_ a ghost and ghosts have the power to possess people, and right now he was a people.

"Maybe next time," Danny hurriedly said, ducking into the wall, avoiding Ember's grasping arms.

Out in the hall, Danny leaned back against the door to Ember's cell and shuddered. He wasn't sure just what he had escaped but from the cursing coming from her cell he was pretty sure he had just escaped from something bad.

***

Danny turned left as instructed and followed his way around the hall of cells. There were occasional crossways cutting from the outer ring of cells to the exercise yard in the center of the prison. A couple times Danny heard guards coming and melted into the wall to hide. One time he found himself in an unused cell, the other time the cell contained some vague, but very large shape snoring loud and wetly on the bunk. Danny nervously waited until the guards had passed then walking back through the wall with a breath of relief.

The intersections between the circular halls and the radial ones were all marked, Danny soon realized. He had started at Cell Block B and quickly passed through Cell Blocks C, D and E. Nearly Cell Block H he realized that there was more activity there. Guards passing on the crossways, a steady buzz of muted conversation. Finally he reached the third ring of prison cells. The radial hall he was in ended at a large, wooden door with heavy iron hinges. Through the door he could glimpse rough hewed stones, angling down to form a wide stairs.

Waiting carefully for the hall to clear of guards, Danny sprinted across the way and into the stairs. He clattered down the stairs, the hard stones echoing every step in alarming volume. He reached the bottom of the stairs and found himself in a small chamber. Two halls lead off from there. One was lit by electric lights hanging from wires stapled to the ceiling. The other was dimmer, with a few flaming torching offering the only light available. Danny turned that way.

Technus was the master of all things technical or mechanical so he couldn't be held in the average cell in Walker's prison. Those doors were locked and unlocked by switches run from a control room. Technology that Technus would exploit. The only place that could hold him was in some technology free cell, someplace without, for example, electric lights.

The hall went on a lot longer than Danny had expected. There were a number of cell along the way. These cells did not have locks. Heavy wooden bars dropped into brackets on either side of the door, locking it into place. There was no technology here for Technus to exploit. This was the one part of the prison that could contain Technus and his particular powers.

Danny had to stop at each cell and listen for sounds of occupation, sometimes sticking his head in to see who was there. When he finally reached Technus' cell there was no doubt that the cell was occupied and who was in it. Technus never stopped talking. Danny walked through the door, catching Technus by surprise in mid-tirade.

"What!" the ghost squawked in his high-pitched, irritating voice, then in a more normal voice, "are you doing here, child?"

"I've come to see you about an E-mail."

"What E-mail? As you can see I have neither the means nor the opportunity to make use of such glorious technology."

"It was an E-mail sent two days ago, supposedly from my friend Tucker's computer to a friend of his. It contained a virus. a _ghost_ virus..."

"A ghost virus?" Technus echoed. "Interesting. How does one turn a ghost into a virus?"

"I was hoping you would know."

"I, Technus, am master of all things technological and mechanical, but this I have not heard of before. Tell me, child, about this E-mail virus."

Danny was puzzled. "You don't know anything about this? But it was you who came out of the virus to attack our friend."

"And I tell you, child, I, Technus, have been here all this time, forced to lick my wounds and brood on the failure of my plans."

"What about Boucou Buxcs? Ever heard of him? Made plans with him, perhaps?"

"Technus works alone, child, surely you know that by now."

Danny scowled and tried to think of another line of attack. "Have you ever heard of someone going around calling themselves Technus 0.7?"

"I, Technus, am the one and only master of technology! No one would bare to steal my name!"

"And the 0.7 thing?" Danny prodded.

"Technus has always been whole and complete. There has never been a fractional version of me."

"No clones, duplicates, spin-offs, copies or emulation?"

"Never!" Technus raged for a moment.

"Well, something weird is going on because yesterday I battled a ghost in the mortal world who looked like you, only like a crudely rendered version of your earlier self. It called itself Technus 0.7. Acted and talked like you. And seemed to materialize out of an E-mail sent to our friend from someone signing themselves as Boucou Buxcs. None of any of this sounds at all familiar to you?" Danny watched Technus' reaction. The ghost had stopped its endless swirling about his prison cell and listened to Danny's story with rapt attention.

"I, Technus, will destroy them. No one. I repeat, no one, steals the look and attribute of me. No one ever! Free me from this accursed cell, mortal child and I will hunt them down to the ends of space and time and destroy them. No one makes a mockery of Technus!"

Danny hadn't considered the idea of working with Technus so the offer came as a shock. The ghost seemed earnestly confused and outraged. But would it really be wise to let him out? Technus was a dangerous ghost, and wily. Maybe he would find Boucou Bucxs or maybe he would just turn on Danny.

Before Danny could make up his mind the cell door slammed open and a familiar voice barked, "No one is escaping from my prison." Danny spun about to see Walker and a dozen of his goons standing in the hall, glowing truncheons in their hands.

Danny turned and ran, grabbing Technus as he passed. Together they passed through the cell wall into another cell and through that into another. A dragon like creature lunged at them only to be drawn up short by a chain around its leg.

Danny angled back to where he believed the hall would be, passed through another wall and found himself in the dim hall, near the stairs. Technus was dragging behind him like a balloon on a short string, squawking every time they passed through another wall. Danny pounded up the stairs, burst through a crowd of disorganized guards and headed for the doors to the exercise compound in the center of the prison. Walker's voice could be heard not far behind yelling instructions to his guards.

A gun blast shattered the stone wall near Danny's head, showering him with hot bits of rock. He ducked and tried to run faster but he was rapidly running out of breath. He ran through the first set of doors to the outside just as another blast passed over his head. He wasn't sure whether a charge from Walker's gun would pass through him the same as he could pass through walls because he was a moral in the Ghost Zone but he didn't want to find out.

A second set of doors, heavy barred, was swinging close as Danny passed. A third set were already close. Habit must have caused the guards to close the doors to stop an escaping prisoner, forgetting that Danny wasn't stopped by doors or walls. They were slowing Walker, though, and that was a good thing.

As he emerged from the last door into the exercise yard Danny switched from mortal to ghost, launching himself into the air almost before the twin bands of light had finished twisted his body through the fourth dimension. He dropped his grip on Technus and yelled, "Come on."

And ran right into a squad of goons.

Danny had forgotten about the many guards stationed in the exercise yard to prevent ghosts from trying to escape. He just knew he had to get aloft and away as fast as possible, back to the Specter Speeder and safety. He was wrestled to the ground. Guards gripped his wrists, trying to twist them behind his back where cuffs could be attached. Danny knew if that ever happened he would never get out of Walker's prison.

Technus was already down, with a number of guards pummeling him unmercifully with their stun truncheons. Wrapping his hands in boiling gobs of ectoplasm Danny was able to keep the guards from completely immobilizing him. A pair of shiny black boots planted themselves in front of him. "Boy, you are in a mess of trouble," Walker growled, "breaking and entering, conspiracy to liberate a dutifully incarcerated miscreant, resisting arrest. It's going to be a long time before you will ever leave here."

"You haven't caught me yet," Danny snapped. He stopped struggling for an instant, and when the guards loosened their grip on him, switched back to mortal form, slipping into the ground, swam through the ectoplasmic substance away from the guards before breaking free, again as a ghost, streaking into the sky.

"Damn you!" Walker shouted. He drew his gun and took aim at Danny retreating form. The range was small. Danny's back filled the sights. Walker smiled with cruel humor as he squeezed the trigger.

A ball of fire exploded over Danny. He gasped in pain, He staggered in the sky for a moment, unable to concentrate. He fought through the pain, tried to stay focused on escaping. If he could reach the Speeder he would be safe. It was just a short distance away on the next floating island. It could out-fly any ghost. All he had to do was stay focused, keep flying and not get shot again....

Walker laughed and aimed the gun again. "I've got you this time, Ghost Boy. No body escaped from Walker." He pulled the trigger again.

Nothing happened.

"What the --!" He turned to see Technus laughing.

"I am Technus, master of things mechanical and I say the child goes free!"

Walker growled. He pointed the gun at Technus and pulled the trigger but it remained jammed. He shoved the useless gun back in its holster. "Get him out of here!" he shouted to the guards. "Put him in the hotbox! Let's see him laugh after sweating in there for a month. And scramble the cycle patrol! Get that boy!"

Danny streaked through the ether, trying to ignore the pain in his side. The island floated up ahead. As he crested the top he could see the tubular shaped Specter Speeder, it's outside door open and welcoming. Home. Home and freedom. Danny drove towards it.


	3. Chapter 3

Danny came crashing through the open door. "Go! Go! Go!" he cried, collapsing to the floor.

Sam hit the "Door Close" button, yanked back on the steering yoke and tromped on the floor mounted throttle. The Specter Speeder heaved off the floating island with a jerk and streaked deep into the Ghost Zone.

"Where are we going?" Sam asked.

"A--way. --Loose -- 'em," Danny panted. He had rolled on to his back and lay in the floor, gasping like an asthmatic whale.

Sam looked into the rear mounted video camera and saw a couple dozen ghosts dressed in identical military type uniforms close behind them. They were mounted on what looked liked flame belching motorcycles.

"Cheezits, the cops!" She exclaimed.

"What?" Tucker asked.

"I always wanted to say that. Walker's guards are after us. They're getting closer."

"Oh, Mamma. I'm too young to go to jail!" Tucker wailed. "Danny where's the guns on this thing?"

"Guns?" Sam echoed. "There's' no guns on this vehicle."

"Of course there's guns on it. It's a Fenton!. Danny, The guns!"

"Gl--ove B--ox" Danny panted. Sam noticed a wide patch on the side of his black jumpsuit that looked -- melted, bubbly.

"Danny, are you al right?" she cried.

"Dude, there's nothing in here but a Playstation controller."

"Th--at's -- it."

"Your old man hacked a Playstation controller to make a weapons console! Cool."

"No. The Playstation is the weapons controller." Danny was starting to breath a little easier. "It uses an old videogame for the sighting logistics. Ever play 'Berlin Blitzkrieg'?"

"That's the targeting program?"

"Press "A" "A", "Left" and 360 on the joystick. That'll switch on the weapons."

"Weapons are activated," a computer generated voice announced. There was a boom and the speeder shock.

"What was that?" Sam demanded as she wrestled the Speeder back into control."

"Main gun." Danny answered. Don't use that again. It'll drain the system after two or three more bursts. Use the Lancet setting." Slowly he pulled himself from the floor and staggered over to the cabin door. Through the porthole there he watched the pursuing ghost police. "Technus helped me escape," he announced. "Jammed Walker gun just as he was going to use it. I owe my life to him."

"Don't tell me we're going back to rescue him," Tucker whined.

"No. He wants us to find this Boucou Buxcs and stop him. There's only one Technus and he's it." Danny was jabbing at the "Door Open" button but nothing was happening. He put a hand on one edge of the panel and starting pushing. After a moment the door reluctantly slid open. Danny leaned out the open door, pointed a finger at one of the pursuing ghost and fired a blast of ectoplasm. The bike the ghost cop was riding exploded, throwing the ghost into the path of another, taking him down as well. He had to pause and catch his wind before using his ghost powers again. Tucker was getting the hand of the Playstation console and blowing up cop bikes with regular success.

The Speeder took a sudden lurch to the right. Danny had to grab hard to the door sill to keep from being thrown out. "Watcha doing, woman?" Tucker demanded. "You made me miss."

"Don't 'woman' me, Tucker Foley. I was just trying to save your scrawny hide. The speeder made another unexpected lurch. "It's called evasive action. If they can't figure out where we're going they can't hit us."

Sam twisted the yoke to the left hard, then back to the right almost as fast. Tucker looked out the windshield and saw a small mountain hurtle by, and then another. Sam barely missed crashing into the second one. "Hey, be careful," he exclaimed.

"I meant to do that," Sam said. "I think we lost them in that maneuver."

"I don't think so," Danny announced from the open door. He ducked his head out and threw ectoplasm after something."

Sam said a few choice words and twisted the yoke around like she was trying to tear it from the floor.

"I think I'm going to be sick," Tucker groaned. "There's got to be a better way. Sam how far back are those cops?"

"About a quarter-mile, I guess."

"That should just do it. Find another mountain and swing behind it. But let me know which one you're going to use and when you're going to change course. Danny, are you sure this bus has enough power for another burst from the main gun?"

"Yeah, I guess. But really only one shot."

"Good enough." Tucker smiled.

Sam pointed to a small floating island they were approaching. "Great" Tucker murmured, getting a tight grip on the game console.

"Here we go!" Sam announced.

"Go!" Tucker echoed.

The speeder whipped around the edge of the island. They passed it so close that Tucker could see individual blades of grass growing on its surface. He had split the video screen in two. One half tracked the cops following behind them, it was showing a projection of their location since the floating island was momentarily blocking them from view. The other half of the screen showed the island. Tucker's eyes shifted back and forth.... "Now!" he cried and hit the "Fire" button.

The Speeder shuddered as the main gun discharged. The island behind them exploded. Great gorts of rock and debris were thrown into the air, filling an area ten times the size of the island. After a moment flashes of light came from behind the sky full of rubble. None of the ghost police appear. Sam make a couple more course changes to be safe, then let the Speeder coast.

"I think we lost them," She said.

Danny hit the Door Close button then staggered back to one of the passenger seats. He collapsed into it.

"Keep an eye out in case one of those guys got around that explosion. That was a pretty good trick, Tuck," Danny panted. He was gingerly feeling the blistered part of his uniform.

"Saw it on 'Star Raiders'." Tucker confessed. "Episode 2. Death Scream of the Kill-mongers."

"Isn't that the one where Stella Astra runs down a corridor and she's not wearing a bra?" Danny asked.

"Hey! Guys, any idea where we are?" Sam interjected, before the boys got distracted by a discussion of movie sleeze.

Danny peered out the windshield and shook his head before slumping back in his chair. "Not a clue," he sighed.

"I thought you had charted the ghost zone," Tucker asked.

"Parts of it. It's a larger place then you think. This could be anywhere."

"You mean we're lost?"

"No, not necessarily. We ought to be able to home in on the Fenton portals' signal. It'll take time, especially if Walker is still out there looking for us.

"What do you want us to do right now?" Sam asked. She noticed Danny's pale face and how he winced when he turned. "Hey, are you all right? Is that blood?"

"I'll be alright," Danny insisted but Sam was suddenly standing over him, fumbling at his neck for the zipper of his jumpsuit. She ripped it down to his waist and started pulling it away from his shoulder.

"Ow! Ow! Stop!" Danny cried in great pain.

She stopped.

"Danny, what happened?"

"Walker may have hit me one time while I was getting away."

"We got to get you home."

"No" Danny exclaimed.! "No, how am I going to explain this to Mom? I'll be alright. Just put a band-aid on it."

"Dude, I don't think they make bandages that big," Tucker said as he slid into the pilot's seat that Sam had abandoned, "and Sam's not wearing a slip."

"What?" Sam shouted, outraged.

"Well, in all the movies the heroine makes bandages by ripping up her slip. It's a tradition. Except Sam's not wearing a slip."

Danny opened an eye and glanced at Sam, who was hovering over him. Her new purple camouflage jeans and tee were still strange to Danny, but he couldn't imagine her ever wearing a slip.

"That is so insane. Tucker don't you have something to do?" Sam said.

"Not really."

"Find something,"

Carefully Sam pulled the jumpsuit away from Danny's burned area. The touch of her fingers as she worked the fabric loose from his skin, the hot breath blowing on his neck sent a thrill down his spine.

After a minute Sam had his jumpsuit hanging down by his waist. On his left side was a raw, blistered area that started slightly below his armpit and run down to just above his hips, and wrapped around his side to cover nearly a third of his back.

"This is not good, Danny," she said. "We've got to get help."

"We can't tell Mom, she'll suspect something. She'll find out I'm a ghost. You know how she is about ghosts."

"She's your mother, Danny; she'll love you no matter what."

"Sam, your mother tries to change you every day. I've never seen her accept you for who you are."

"Yeah, but your mother's different. I know."

"And if you're wrong I'm dead. I can't take that chance."

"You got a First Air kit on this thing?" Sam asked, changing the subject again.

"First cabinet, top shelf."

Sam found a small metal box, white with a large red cross painted on it. She opened it up and found a number of small tubes and boxes. Pawing through them she came up with a tube of Bacitracin."Is this the only First Aid kit?" she asked. "I don't think there's enough ointment to cover everything."

"That's it, Sam, we'll just have to make do."

Sam was holding up boxes of small band-aids. "What kind of first aid did they think we'd need out here?" she wondered, "little boo-boos? We need to find something big to cover your burns."

"Slip," Tucker called from the pilot's seat. He was toying with some instruments, trying to get a bearing on the signal from the Fenton Portal.

"Tucker!" Sam called warningly. "Besides, I think they tear up their petticoats."

"I get it. I'm sorry. Wish I had never brought it up," Tucker muttered. He seemed happy about what he had found on the instruments. He turned the yoke before pressing down on the accelerator.

Sam was rummaging through the First Aid kit again looking for some kind of wrap when she pulled out an aerosol canister. "Dermalsol?" She read. "Hey Danny, what's this?"

"Dunno."

"Tucker, see if you can find an entry for something called Dermalsol - D-E-R-M-A-L-S-O-L" on the Speeder's computer."

While Tucker was working Sam found a packet with sterile latex gloves. She ripped it open and slipped one on, squirted a glob of Bacitracin on her gloved fingers and bent to Danny's blistered area. "Here goes nothing, Danny. Ready?"

"Mmmm"

She started spreading the antibiotic across the blisters. She tried to use as light a touch as possible. Danny hissed in pain but said nothing.

"You ok?" she asked as she added a second glop and started spreading it.

"Just get it over with," he whispered between gritted teeth.

After another minute Sam announced she was done. "We still need to cover that up."

"I'll just pull up my jumpsuit. That'll cover it."

"No way. We're trying to protect your burn from your jumpsuit.

"It's not dirty."

"When have you ever washed that thing?"

"It's always clean when I become Danny Phantom."

"We'll find something else." Sam stated and pulled open one cabinet after another. "Tucker, did you ever find anything about that Dermasol?" She called.

"I've been busy locating the signal from the Ghost Portal.: he called back.

"That can wait until we take care of Danny."

"I just thought getting out of here was the top priority. 'Dermasol... Dermasol.... There's nothing under general information about it. "

"Look up the First Aid Kit. maybe it's listed there."

"Bandages, gauze, ointment? Experimental. Here it is. 'Experimental skin replacement.' Use only under Protocol 5. Any idea what that is?"

Danny shook his head.

Sam started shaking the can, then pulled Danny's arm up. The spray formed an orangish-brown cover over the damaged skin.

"We still need to cover the burned area." She went back to prowling through the cabinets. Finally she cried in triumph; turned, shaking out a aluminized blanket. She folded into a long, thin sheet, with the felt side on the inside. "Here," she ordered Danny, placing one end of the blanket on his chest. "Lift your arms."

Sam wrapped the blanket around Danny twice and slipped the other end under his hand. Danny looked on befuddled. Sam pulled up Danny's jumpsuit and got one arm into the sleeve, Transferring the blanket to his other hand, Danny finished getting his suit back on. Sam ran the zipper back up and stepped back to look at her accomplishment. "How does that feel?" she asked.

"I feel like The Mummy." Danny raised his arms in front of him and went "O-o-O-O-o-o."

"Seriously, Dude, we're in big trouble," Tucker said from the pilot's seat. "Besides Danny looking like a toasted marshmellow, the Specter Speeder took some heavy fire back there as well. Maybe we could slip Danny past his folks but scorch marks on the Speeder are going to cause some comment."

"How long till we reach the Fenton Portal," Sam murmured.

"We're flying on the bearing, but whether we're flying to or from the portal we won't know for another hour or so. If the signal strength increases then we're getting closer. If it drops, then we've been going the wrong way."

"Maybe we ought to stop for a moment so Danny can fly out and see how bad the damage is."

"What's the point, we can't fix anything. We don't have any tools." Danny had walked up to the cockpit. He was holding on to the back of the chairs for support as he looked the windshield. "Hey I recognize this place. We're close to Clockwork's Castle." He pushed Tucker out of the pilot's seat and sat down. "We can go talk to him. I bet he knows who Boucou Buxcs is and what he's trying to do."

"Why would the Ghost of Time help us?" Tucker asked.

"He likes me."

"I don't think so," Sam said. "

"He kept me from becoming Dark Dan."

"I thought he said he was supposed to destroy you to prevent Dark Dan from ever existing," Tucker wondered. "Instead he let Dark Dan come into existence then manipulated time -- and you -- so that Dark Dan would be trapped in a thermos."

"If he can play with time that easily," Sam added, "I would think he could have found some way to prevent you from becoming Dark Dan altogether "

"Yeah. It's like he wants Dark Dan, but under his control, like." Tucker continued.

"Makes you wonder what he can see in the future that's so bad that he needs Dark Dan to fix it." Sam said.

"Pariah Dark. That's the only ghost I know of that could Dark Dan a run for his money."

"And what could he offer Dark Dan for his help?"

"Maybe he expected Dark Dan and Pariah, or whoever, to cancel each other out."

"Wow, you guys have really thought this out," Danny said when they were finished, rolling is eyes as he spoke. "But the other time, Clockwork let me go back in time to find out how to save you two from Ecto-Acne."

"But didn't you screw up the timeline by trying to stop Vlad from becoming a ghost, and Clockwork had to undo your mess?"

"Hey, I fixed that mess on my own."

"That's not how it sounded when you told us about it." Tucker said.

"I got my folks back together."

"After your mother had been married to Vlad for twenty years. You know what married people do, don't you Danny. The whole concept is one massive 'Ewwww'!"

"What do you means?"

"I am not explaining that to Danny," Tucker declared.

"S-E-X, Danny. Just because you got your parents back together didn't erase the fact that for twenty years your mother... And you and Jazz still didn't exist in that world. Clockwork had to reset the past. The past you messed up. So I don't think he'll want to see you again, or help you out. "

"There's no harm in asking, Sam."

Sam Manson glowered for a moment. "All right. I guess you can ask."

"Maybe, you know, he was trying to teach me a lesson," Danny mused.

"And what might that be?" Sam asked.

"Don't mess in the past?" Tucker offered. "Don't leave you clothes on the floor?"

"Don't cheat in tests!"

"Hey, that's not fair."

"Maybe he was trying to tell you that life's not fair and you can't depend on god-like ectoplasmic representations to fix things for you."

"Huh."

"Never mind, just find Clockwork."

***

Danny had been flying the Specter Speeder for over an hour when Tucker frowned and asked, "Didn't we pass that island already?"

"Hmm, maybe?"

"I thought you knew where you were going, Dude."

"I do."

"Then why do we keep passing the same rock?"

"I think Clockwork has taken in the "Welcome" mat," Sam said smugly. "He's steering us around his castle so we can't get to it."

"Like heck he's going to keep me out."

"Give it up, Danny. You can't fight someone who can travel through time."

"I -- will -- not -- give -- up," Danny growled, whipping the speeder through a number of tight turns, speeding up and braking suddenly. Sam and Tucker found themselves hanging on to their chairs . Sam was about to plead again for Danny to stop when the Speeder suddenly burst around a small floating island and zoomed down towards a castle on a ver large island. It had a square central structure with a pair of rambling wings coming out the sides. The tops of the walls were crenellated. There were five towers of uneven heights. From the topmost hung a flag that pictured an hourglass on the field.

"I told you I would get us here," Danny announced defiantly.

***

The castle gate opened upon their approach. Long halls loomed in the distance. Torches flared into life as they approached and extinguished themselves after they had passed. The castle at once sounded both empty, untenanted and filled with a thousand frantic ticking clocks, much like Clockwork who was young, old and middle-aged at the same time. Though the halls constantly branched off in different directions, which Sam suspected all lead back to the entrance, Danny followed an unerring path through them until he lead his friends into a vast, almost dimensionless expanse filled with ticking clocks of all kinds, view-screens and in one corner a gap-toothed baby floating in the air, a weathered staff floating next to him.

"You do realize," he said as he morphed into a gnarled old man, "that I could have stopped you from getting here any time I wanted."

"You're bluffing," Danny answered.

"Think what you will, Daniel Fenton," the old man straightened up and became a hearty being of forty or fifty years ago. "As is your right. You've come to ask about Boucou Buxcs."

"How did you know?" Tucker gasped.

"I would be a poor excuse for the master of time if I did not."

"Right, so who he is and what he he trying to do?"

"You're not interested in how he could create digital clones of Technus? I would have thought that would have been the most interesting thing about him. It's quite a trick you know."

"Excuse me for being shallow, then," Danny answered sarcastically. "I mostly care about people who are trying to hurt me friends."

"Youth!" the infant Clockwork cooed. "It is your one virtue, King Phantom. Ghosts are old people. Even Youngblood is old, old....old. We act out of our roles because that is what we are supposed to do, never questioning why." The infant clockwork abruptly became ancient, pulled out the pacifier that had remained in his mouth, shook it until it snapped into a pipe and returned it to his mouth. "You question everything, defy everyone. You alone are new in a universe of the old.

"So you will tell us about Boucou Buxcs?" Tucker asked.

"No. I admire your youthful determination, but this story must play out the way it must. I can not interfere.

"Why not, you have in the past?"

"I had my reasons then..."

"I knew it, whispered Sam

"... ut this time is different. Besides, I think anyone who can lock Dark Pariah back in his tomb doesn't need any help from me."And with the stroke a clock the hall was empty, dust-covered and dark. Danny raised some ectoplasmic energy from his fingertip to provide light.

"I guess the interview is over," Tucker said.

"Yeah..." Danny whispered in awe. "What the hell all did he mean?"

"King Phantom," Sam whispered. "I don't like the sound of that. Danny, promise me one thing?'

"Sure, what?"

"If you ever become king -- quit."

"Don't you want to become Queen, Sam?" Tucker teased. "Think of the power?"

"My parents have power. It sucks. I don't want to be like them, I don't want Danny to become like them."

"Sure, whatever. I am not going to become Dark Dan or King Phantom or any of that stuff. Clockwork was just pulling our leg. Anyway I expect Sam will kick my butt if I ever start weirding out."

He turned and strode down the corridor. They others hurried to catch up.

"What was that all about, Sam?" Tucker whispered.

She shook her head. "Does Clockwork ever do anything by accident or has he had it all planned out from the beginning of time?"

***

They soon reached the castle gate. As soon as they has stepped through to the outside the castle gate slid shut and the whole castle disappeared. The Specter Speeder stood a short distance away. There was something different about it.

Danny launched himself in to the air and streaked towards it, Sam and Tucker running behind. They caught up with Danny as he was finishing reading a note stuck on the speeder's door. Wordlessly, he handed it to them.

.

"Just to demonstrate that I am the ultimate deus ex machina, I have fixed your vehicle."

It was signed with the image of a clock with both hands at the top, with was labeled XIII instead of 12.

"He fixed the speeder, after all he said about not helping us?" Sam exclaimed.

"What's a deus ex machina?" Danny wondered.

"Ancient Greek plays," Sam explained, "ended with a mechanical crane lowering an actor playing one of the gods who would wrap up the story, hand out rewards and punishments and explain the morale of the play. The crane they rode was call the deus ex machina, machine of the gods. Today it's come to mean any cheap contrivance in a story, the fortunate coincidence, the lucky break, what have you, that a writer uses to solve some problem in his plot."

"If he fixed the Specter Speeder, did he..." Danny ripped open his jumpsuit hoping to find clean skin underneath but the foil blanket bandage was still in place, only a note had been crammed on top.

.

"The wages of deering-do is pain and suffering. This I am not allowed to fix."

.

"Is that a smiley face at the end of his message?" Sam asked.

"Clockwork has a sense of humor?" Tucker asked.

"Apparently," Sam answered," but not one I would rely on. He fixed the damage to the Speeder, which we could worked around have gotten us into big trouble but not Danny's burns which could be life threatening."

"We would have figured out some way to hide the damage until we had time to fix it," Danny said. "A little paint, some sanding and it would have been as good as new."

"And the burn is more serious so it's something we will have to deal with for a while."

"Let's go home. The Ghost Zone is starting to freak me out," Tucker announced. "It's like Alice in Wonderland, only without the cute bunnies."

"I'm with Tuck, Danny. I think we've had more than our share of adventures today."

"One more place." Danny insisted. "There's one last place that may have information about Boucou Bucxs and we ought to investigate it while we're here."

"Oh, no."

"It's the Library of the Ghost Zone. When has anything dangerous ever happened in a library?"

"There's always the danger of learning something." Sam quipped.

***

It was a short, straightforward trip to the Ghost Zone Library, since it wasn't trying to hide from anyone.

The Library was an eight-sided building build around a central garden that was in itself three or four acres in extent. A formal maze surrounded a large fountain and flowers of many colors and levels of animation decorated the walks outside the maze. Sam, who had seem more than a few formal gardens in her time was impressed. Danny and Tucker, who tended to think that dandelions were flowers, were less impressed.

The front of the Library was build of tall Greek columns with a deep portico in front and a steep flight of steps leading from the ground up to the entrance. Since ghosts were flying in and out of the Library without ever using the stairs Tucker wondered why they were there, but grateful that they were there since he couldn't fly.

Danny lead the way inside. The library was an open hall, three stories tall, with a gabled ceiling and cathedral windows lining the inner wall. The outer walls was lined with books from floor to ceiling. A balcony wrapped around the building about half way up. Ladders on wheels were mounted on both floors to provide access to the books on the tallest shelves.

Beside the entrance was a long desk with five or six ghosts, no two of them looking anything like, stamping books, sorting piles of returned books or looking things up in huge bound volumes. Except for the fact that librarians and visitors alike were all hideous monsters, it looked like any library, Sam, Tucker or Danny had ever been in.

A shadow fell over them.

"We don't alone your kind here" a Stentorian voice whispered.

What? Jews?" Sam asked.

"Blacks?" Tucker challenged.

"Mortals!" It answered

"Oh."

"Well, I'm not mortal, I'm a ghost, so you have to let me in," Danny said.

"You're the Haffa. That's nearly as bad as being a mortal."

"We just want to look something up. We're not trying to check out any books."

"There are dark terrible things here that are not meant for mortal eyes."

"But you'd let an idiot like the box ghost read them."

"Danny!" Sam whispered, "don't pick a fight."

"Listen to the puny female. You don't want to pick a fight with me." The librarian straightened up to its full twenty feet and opened its mouth to show the several rows of bristling fangs.

A monster at a near-by table turned to them and hissed "shhh" from several mouths. It pointed with half a dozen scaley tentacles to a sign hanging over the librarians desk. "Silence, Please."

"Come to think of it," Danny suggested, "it would be a lot easier to just let us have thirty minutes to look up a few things then have a ruckus trying to throw us out."

The hideous librarian glared at the three for a moment, opening up a dozen extra eyes on its body to get s better view. "Thirty minutes, then begone." it whispered and slithered aside to let them in.

Sam scampered over to the card catalog and quickly pulled open a draw. "Hey," She cried, then blushed for speaking loudly, "Look, Danny, everything is in Sanskrit."

"You can read Sanskrit?"

"Well, no, but I recognize the shape of the letters. The Theosophians were right, Sanskrit is the original first language."

"Uh, Sam, the English card catalog is over here," Tucker called softly.

"Oh."

"So much for the Theosophians, whoever they were,"

"Quacks, obviously."

"Hey, look!" Tucker was holding up a fragment of pasteboard.

"What is it?" Sam asked.

"Find Boucou Buxcs?"

"No, but right after 'Bouci' I found this lying in the bottom of the drawer."

"It's a piece from a catalog card. There's 'b-o-u...' and the rest is torn off.

"Sounds like someone has been here ahead of his clearing out any evidence of Boucou Buxcs." Danny groused. "Now what? Sam, you go to libraries, what would you do?"

"Sometimes, Danny, your fear of learning is appalling."

"Well?"

"Telephone books?" Tucker suggested.

"Go to the desk and ask," Sam suggested.

"You, those librarians scare me."

"Tucker, they're just librarians. They're not going to bite your head off."

"I think the one with huge teeth might."

"Then go to the one at the end of the desk. It almost looks normal."

Reluctantly Tucker went off on his mission. After a moment he came back. "They have never heard of telephones or telephone books.

"Did you ask about the Internet."

"Tucker slapped his forehead. "I'm not going back there. Any way the absence of computer terminals here in the library is a pretty good clue that they don't have the Internet here either."

"What about an Who's Who?" Sam suggested.

"Great idea. Where would that be?"

"Ask a librarian."

"Again!" Tucker cried, hoarsely to keep his voice down.

"Baby," Sam sneered. "I'll go."

They watched her go. "Tucker, I keep thinking that maybe Clockwork was giving me a clue when he said he wasn't."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. I'm trying to remember everything he said but nothing sounds like a clue."

"He did call you 'King.' That was kind of weird."

"Too weird. There was something else he said that relatedly directly to Boucou Buxcs."

"I remember he was disappointed that we weren't interested in how he cloned Technus..."

"That's it!" Danny cried out. A number of monsters turned withering looks at him and hissed for silence. "Let's look up everything on cloning or digitizing ghosts. Maybe we can find a clue there."

They hurried back to the card catalog, pulled out various drawers and thumbed through the pasteboards inside.

Sam was back after a few minutes. "Someone has ripped the page out of the Who's Who that would cover Boucou Buxcs. The Library Monsters are very upset. I think they wanted to blame me, fortunately I obviously have never been here before. What are you guys looking up?"

Danny explained and Sam pulled out another draw anf got to work.

"Here's 'quantum spectral dynamics' " She called after a minute, "by a Phineas Buckerwald."

"Is something like that even going to be in English?" Danny asked.

"I'll go look." She scribbled a reference number down and went to one of the librarian monsters for directions.

Tucker soon called out "Got something" and went off looking for the proper part of the library. The monster at the desk pointed to a high shelf on the balcony floor. Tucker gulped and raced for a staircase.

Danny had looked up "making clones" and "Creating clones" and "generating clones" with no luck. "He went over to another drawer as the monster that had stopped them as the front door oozed over.

"You have five minutes left mortal. There will no extensions. After this never come here again."

"Then don't distract me!" Danny snapped.

There were three cards on cloning. One for a monograph by Vlad Plasmeus. Another was on the ethics of cloning by Plato ("The Plato?" Danny wondered). The last card was "A Theory for preserving psychological stages by electronic mortal media." It was by Beauregard C. Buchwald.

"Where can I find this?" he demanded from the monster still hovering next to him.

"Use the index number." A tentacle pointed to a string of numbers printed on the top corner of the card.

"Where's this section of the library?"

"You have only two minutes."

"Where!" Danny shouted.

Amidst a sea of 's-h-h-h-h' the monster pointed to a distant section.

Danny sped through the air, finding the label for that section of the shelves as much by luck as anything, skimmed through the shelves before finding the book. He pulled it out and started flipping through it. From chapter heading and some diagram labels he could tell this was it. Someone had figured out how to record ectroplasm on electronic media. He was about to start reading when the book was yanked from his hands. He looked up into the baleful eyes if the gigantic librarian.

"Time is up, mortal. Leave now and never return."

"But that's the book I was looking for."

"You do not have withdrawal privileges here. You do no have entry permission here. Go, before we summon Walker to deal with criminals like you."

"Walker! No, no. No need to bother him. We're leaving now!" Danny flew back towards the entrance. He saw that Sam and Tucker had already been herded there. Swooping down he grabbed their hands, exerted intangibility over them and carried them off to the Specter Speeder.

He let them down out of the air as he continued on to the pilot's seat, powered up the engines and streaked off at maximum speed.

He was just rounded a small floating island when he saw the first of Walker's motorcycle mounted troopers reach the library.

"Walker's goons are all over the place," he explained as Sam and Tucker picked themselves up and found seats. "Everybody grab a viewer and keep an eye out for them. I'm making a beeline to the portal.

***

A couple of detour aside to avoid Walker's patrols, the trip back to the Portal was uneventful. The heavy steel doors irised open when Danny keyed in his genetic signature and they slid through the short interface tunnel into the normal universe. The hover jets kicked in as the Specter Speeder floated back to its launch cradle. Danny disengaged the engines and began the lengthy shutdown procedure. Sam and Tucker went around straightening up things inside the cabin.

Sam ducked out to dump a bag of trash. When she came back she was looking very puzzled.

"Danny, what time did we leave?" she asked.

"Around one, because my parents had just left for that conference with their tax accountants. Why?"

"They were supposed to be gone for four or five hours, right?"

"Yeah."

"And how long were we in the Ghost Zone?"

"I don't know. Longer than we expected but my parents obviously haven't come back yet."

"Uh, Danny," Tucker interrupted. "My watch says it's after Ten. We're been gone for over nine hours."

"Nine hours!" Danny exclaimed. "We are so dead."

"That's what I was thinking," Sam said, "but look at the clock outside...."

Danny and Tucked craned their heads to the side of the windshield to see the large clock mounted on the lab wall. With a gasp they saw it read 6:08.

"AM or PM?" Danny asked.

"Don't you see what happened?"

Danny and Tucker looked at her blankly.

With a roll of her eyes she explained. "Clockwork rolled time back for us so we wouldn't get caught by your parents."

"See, I told you he liked me." Danny crowed.

"R-i-g-h-t."

"Hey, wonder if he if he fixed my burn after all." Danny pulled down the zipper and was disappointed to find the aluminum foil blanket was still there.

"Hey, you'd better change to human, I don't think Clockwork gave us any more extra time then he had to.

Danny nodded and stepped back a pace. He concentrated. A band of light burst out of his waist and as suddenly disappeared. Danny collapsed to the floor with a gasp of pain.

"Danny!" Sam screamed.

She as on her knees cradling his head when Danny started to move.

"What happened?" she asked. For all the brief appearance of the band of light, Danny had changed back to Danny Fenton, black hair, white T-shirt, blue jeans and everything.

"I felt like I was being torn apart. Hey," Danny grabbed his T-shirt and pulled it up. "Hey, my burns are gone!"

"What?" Sam ran her hand over Danny chest. "It is. They are gone."

Tucker looked at Danny's undamaged chest. "Maybe it's gone because you were injured as Danny Phantom. When you become Danny Fenton no injury. Change back and see if the burns are still there."

"No way. It hurt too much changing this time. I don't think I want to change again until I have to."

"You may not heal if you stay Fenton," Tucker suggested.

"I'll take that chance.

"I think we've gotta get out of the Speeder -- now" She pushed them towards the Spectral Speeder's door.

They were barely out and had the door closed before Maddie Fenton's voiced echoed down the stairs, "Danny? Is that you down there?"

"Hi Mom, we're down here." Danny called back.

"I thought I heard you scream. Are you alright?"

"Just dropped a wrench on my foot. I'm alright."

Danny's parents came through the door as he was speaking. "Hey, kiddo, how's it going?" Jack Fenton asked. He was wearing a polyester suit with a narrow, out-of-date tie. Maddie Fenton was in a tastefully tailored pantsuit. Danny was struck how pretty her eyes were when they weren't covered by the inevitable goggles. She had shoulder-length wavy russet hair.

"Fine, fine. How did the meeting with the accounts go?" Danny said. It was always strange seeing his parents dressed up for business, out of their jumpsuits and in normal clothes.

"Fine, fine. How about we go upstairs for some hot fudge sundaes?" Jack Fenton said, dropping a ham like hand on his son's shoulder. "Business really takes it out of me."

Danny looked at his friends. They hadn't learned as much as they had wanted from their trip into the Ghost Zone but they had learned a lot. Tomorrow there would be plenty of time to figure out exactly what they had learned. Right now a hot fudge sundae sounded just right.


	4. Chapter 4

It was Noon the next day when Danny finally caught up with his friends. They had come to the Nasty Burger for lunch and to talk over when they had learned in the Ghost Zone Library.

Danny had just sat down with his tray when his cellphone chirped. He pulled it out of his pocket and frowned at the unfamiliar number displayed. He flipped it open and listened as a gasping voice boomed out:

"Hey, Dan, it's Sid. -- Ahhhh! -- Remember me from camp?" Something crashed in the background. "You said to -- ah -- call if I ever needed anything, Remember?"

"Sid, are you all right?"

"Not really. Seriously, Dan, Danny, I -- help!"

Another voice took over the phone, "I'm sorry the party to which you were speaking is no longer available." It cackled in the familiar shill tones of Technus.

"What the--?" Danny grumbled. "Tucker can you get me Sid's location. I think he lives about twenty miles from here. When you've got it met me in the bathroom."

Danny tried to crammed the rest of his Nasty Burger into his mouth.

"You shouldn't fight on a full stomach," Sam suggested, appalled by how much of the sandwich was disappearing.

"I paid good money for this burger, I'm going to enjoy as much of it as I can." Danny mumbled, dropped what was left on his tray and bolted for the men's room.

Tucker was busy transferring data from his PDA into a GPS device. A moment later he, too, raced into the bathroom. There followed a pause, then a sharp cry of pain and a moment later Tucker emerged by himself.

"I don't know what guys do together in the restroom but that sounded so wrong," Sam said as Tucker slid back into his seat.

"Hey he needed some place to change."

"I know. I'm just saying."

"Man, It hurts when he changes."

"I heard it out here," Sam told him. "Did Danny want us to do anything?"

"Nah. Just took the GPS tracker and bolted."

"We should follow."

"How. Our scooters go 15 miles an hour, top. By the time we got there the fighting would be over. Long over"

Sam reached into a small purse belted around her waist and pulled out her cell phone. "Hey, Jazz, " she said when the call was picked up,."Want to help Danny on a ghost fighting expedition? .... Yes, I know it's on rather short notice. That's how these things go.... It's a little ways out of town. ...Because you're the only one with a car ... Ok, technically I do own a car, but it's more for investment purposes. Anyway I can't drive I don't have a license.... Just get over here! Danny has an emergency and we need to back him up, OK.. ... Fine, thanks. Oh, by the way, pick up a Fenton Thermos on your way out. I don't think Danny was carrying one when he had to leave. Bye." She closed her phone. "Sheesh! I thought she wanted to help Danny."

Tucker was eyeing the fries left on Danny's tray.

"Go ahead," Sam sighed, "he's not coming back for them."

***

Sid and Danny had met the month before at Camp Sleepy Hollow. Danny had roped him in to help one night when the ghost haunting the place had possess Tucker and T'Keisha. Sid was a malcontent, a delinquent who barely avoided the Reformatory. He was big and rangy, a couple years older than Danny but shared a dislike for their camp counselor, Dash Baxter, and a liking for pulling pranks. Fighting the camp ghost had left Sid pretty beat up but had given him the most fun he had had in a long time. Perhaps because it was the first time he had used his strength and restless energy for something worthwhile. They hadn't talked since camp, as is the way with boys, but Danny regarded him as one of his closest friends.

Sid lived in a bedroom community outside Amity Park. It wasn't so much a town as one long endless housing development of neat houses on small lots, mile after mile. Without the GPS device Danny would never have been able to find Sid's house because it looked just like every other house on the block. And for several blocks around. It was a ranch style house with a dogleg pointing to the back and the garage somewhat in front of the rest of the house. It had a black shingle roof, a sickly small tree in the front and a swing set on the backyard bent on killing Sid.

The swing set was scuttling along like a giant red daddy-long-legs. It had two swings, a center pair of legs supporting them and a short slide on the other side of the center legs. All were waving furiously. Sid was hobbling away from it as fast as he could move but was hampered by the five foot high wooden fence that bound him in like a dog. From time to time the swing would lash out like a whip striking Sid across the back.

Danny swooped down, firing ectoplasmic blasts at the swing set. He succeeded to lopping off the chains of one of the swings, causing it to collapse on the ground like the piece of chain and plastic it was.

The swing set swung on its attacker. It reared up on one pair of legs,putting its other legs twetny feet in the air. It's small slide lashing up like a tongue trying to flick Danny out of the sky. He swirled around it, blasting at one of its long legs but the swing set moved too quickly for him to make contact.

A sudden smashing impact sent him crashing to the ground. He had grown incautious and had missed one of the other legs curving up and swinging at him like a baseball bat. The upraised leg was poised over him about to spike him into the ground, when Sid threw himself on Danny, grabbing a shoulder and pulling him out of the way. Unfortunately it was Danny's wounded shoulder. When they stopped rolling Danny's eyes were filled with tears of pain. He barely saw the swing set coming at him through his blurry eyes. Instinctively he raised a barrier field and felt the heavy steel leg bang down hard on it.

The Swing set turned towards Sid who had rolled farther away, outside the coverage of Danny's shield. It raised a pile driver leg....

Danny's blast cut the swing in two. It collapsed in on itself, shuddered for a moment, as if trying to pick itself up one last time, before crumpling into inert ordinary steel.

"Hey, You're that ghost kid!" Sid said from the ground. Gingerly he picked himself up and limped over to shake Danny's hand. "What was your name, again?"

"Inviso-bill will do" Danny said cautiously. While he hated the name 'Inviso-Bill' it didn't sound much like Danny Fenton the way 'Danny Phantom' did. It was a lot easier convincing people he was two different people when he didn't use the same first name.

"You were there at Camp helping us fight that ghost."

"Right. And you're Sid, right?" Of course it was Sid. It was all part of keeping Sid thinking that Danny and Danny were two different persons.

"Yeah. Thanks for coming, man. Who know a swing set could be so dangerous. How did Danny reach you so fast? I mean, when I called him, I thought for sure I was a goner."

"Lucky you're not," Danny avoided answering his question. "How did this happen?"

"It was like, weird, man. I got this E-mail from Altheria, she's this cool girl at Camp with all the piercing. We've kind of hit it off and have been exchanging E-mails. Well this one had an attachment that she said was pretty cool. But when I opened it up there was this blue faced guy with a squeaky voice yelling at me."

"Called himself Technus 0.7."

"Yeah, man. How did you know?"

"Same happened to T'Keisha."

"The chick with the cool cornrows?"

Danny nodded.

"What's going on? Is that ghost from the camp coming back for us?"

"No. He's gone. Take it from a ghost who knows, it's long gone. This is something else, though Danny's not sure just what yet."

"Whoooa."

"So what happened to Technus 0.7? He wasn't in the swing so he must still be around here somewhere."

"He's probably still in the house, bro."

Sid led the way across the tore up back yard into his house. They entered by the kitchen door. A clock over the sink was swirling around, counting off the hours every few seconds. A blender buzzed on frappe. Danny gingerly reached over and pulled out its plug but it continued to spin. A microwave oven popped open its door and slammed it shut repeatedly. Chairs were overturned in a dining nook, Nearby on the floor lay a cellphone. Sid picked it up and looked at it. It appeared undamaged. "Do you think it's OK?" he wondered. Danny shrugged his shoulders.

The living room was the center of the disaster. Seat cushions from the couch were everywhere. End tables were overturned, their few magazines and newspapers scattered everywhere. In one corner was a small, tall, solid front cabinet. It's door was open revealing a computer. The mouse was hovering in the air like a cobra, hissing. Technus 0.7's face filled the screen. It was laughing manically but in sort of a broken loop. "Ha-ha-ha-ha-hic" "Ha-ha-ha-ha-hic" "Ha-ha-ha-ha-hic"

"What!" the ghost suddenly stopped laughing, "you're still alive? We can fix that for I, Technus 0.7, am master of all your technology. I control your horizontal. I control your vertical. I..."

"Shut up!" Danny snapped, and blasted the monitor.

"Whoa, Aunt Becky ain't going to like that!" Sid exclaimed.

The smoke rising from the busted monitor started changing colors, becoming a decided robin blue. Glowing eyes formed in the cloud.

"Uh oh!" Sid whispered. He sidled past Danny and grabbed something from beside the front door. As he swung it behind his back Danny recognized it as a Louisville Slugger.

"The Fenton's have one of those," Danny said, waiting for Technus to fully emerge from the busted monitor. "Only they called it a Fenton Creepstick."

"That Mrs. Fenton, she's hot."

"R-i-g-h-t." This had to be the most awkward moment in Danny's life -- so far.

"You know who else is hot? Jazz Fenton."

"Great. Uh, we've got a homicidal ghost here. let's focus on the task at hand."

"Oh, yeah. She like gave me this test after I woke up in the hospital about my experiences fighting the Camp Ghost, but I'm sure she was hitting on me."

"Sid, focus."

Though he was only half-formed, Technus suddenly lunged at Danny, its arms telescoping out to reach half away across the room. Sid swung the bat, cracking the ghost heartily alongside its head. The ghost turned towards Sid so Danny shot it in the back. Suddenly the telephone leaped off the floor where it had fallen during an earlier fight and wrapped itself around Danny's neck.

Danny wrestled with it for a moment. Several loud thuds indicated that Sid was holding his own. Danny finally flung the phone away and reached behind his back for the Fenton Thermos, only to find it not there. With a curse he flung himself on Technus, trying to drag the ghost of technology out of the house and away from so many gadgets. Sid was being menaced by an upright vacuum cleaner. But so far it only bumped at his feet, It hadn't gotten the idea to try to use its extension cord to tie him up or strange him. Danny gloped it with ecto-goo, sticking it in place temporarily.

He crashed through the front door, carrying Technus with him, only to be greeted with the snap of an electric line whipping off the pole straight at him. Danny dodged but had to let Technus go. A second electric line joined the first in snapping at Danny as Technus, hovering near the transformer laughed.

The broken laugh pattern and occasionally twitch in his image reminded Danny that this wasn't really Technus but some kind of buggy computer emulation. In a flash Danny realized that it might be vulnerable to things that Technus wouldn't be.

The next time an electric line flashed at Danny he sidestepped it then grasped the wire a short distant from the end, on a portion that was still insulated. He flew straight at Technus, dragging the writhing powerline with him. Technus didn't see his danger until it was too late.

Danny flung the hot wire straight into the clone ghost. With a snap and sizzle. Technus exploded. The powerlines dropped to the ground. Inside the house racket from the many overstimulated gadgets abruptly ceased.

Sid emerged from the house holding a broken bat. There was a welt on the side of his head but he looked triumphant.

"We did it man. We kicked that ghost's butt from here to Kalamazoo! Wooo hooo!"

Danny flew down and sat on the front stoop. "Yeah, but your place is totally trashed."

"Oh, yeah. Aunt Becky is going to be royally pissed. I might have to go back and live with my dad."

"You don't live with your parents?"

"Are you kidding? They divorced when I was, like, six. I've never seen my mother since. Actually I'm not sure they divorced. One day she was just gone. All I remember of them is dad drinking and them fighting. Man, it was scary fist-through-the-wall kind of fights. After mom left dad never could stay sober. The courts were going to put me in foster care till Aunt Becky spoke up, and I've been living with her since."

"Wow. And I thought my life was crazy because all my parents ever talk about is fighting ghosts."

"You've got parents. All I've got is a deadbeat and an aunt who took me in because she felt she had to."

"Sorry I blew up your computer. I really would like to look at that E-mail and see if it's the same as the one T'Keisha got. Hers was sent, supposedly, from Tucker. And you say yours came from Altheria."

"Yeah, for a chick, she's cool."

Briefly, Danny wondered how long Altheria would think Sid 'cool' with an attitude like that.

"I can kind of understand how Tucker could have gotten a computer infected by a ghost," Danny explained, "but I'm not sure how Altheria's computer could have gotten infected. Do you mind if I take the hard drive with me and have Tucker look it over."

"Sure."

Sid lead the way back into the house. The television, Danny noticed, had been battered into rubble. Sid noticed him looking at the TV and explained, "Can you believe that thing was trying to eat me. Broke my bat having to beat it down. It had. like, half my leg inside it at one point and I don't know where it went because it wasn't sticking out of the back of the set, that's for sure."

Sid found Danny a screwdriver so he could take the computer apart and retrieve the hard drive.

"You going to be alright," Danny asked as he stuck the hard drive inside his jumpsuit (it didn't have any pockets). "Need some help cleaning up?"

"Oh, yeah. I'll be fine. I'm sure you've got other things to do, ghosts to beat up and stuff. Say 'hi' to Danny when you see him and thanks for coming."

"Don't hesitate to call. Especially if anything else weird happens. Just in case this Technus ghost tries to come back."

Danny soared into the sky, oriented himself and started back towards Amity Park. he had hardly gone a mile when he spotted Jazz's car, a rather rusty and ancient Chevette. He turned around and into the back seat before materializing next to Tucker, who let out a little girly scream of surprise. Jazz nearly ran off the road.

"Hey, I'm glad to see you guys, too," he said.

His day hadn't started like this.

***

Despite the load of sugars, creams, syrups, and flavorings both natural and artificial on his body, or perhaps because of it, Danny had slept poorly that night. After endlessly tossing and turning he was still awake when the first rays of dawn began to brighten his bedroom window. He slide out of bed and padded across the room to stared out the window. The streets were still dark below him as was the sky above. Only a few very high clouds glowed with a strange luminance. The birds, though, were already greeting the day with chirps, whistles, whoops and the tata-tat-tat of a woodpecker.

Danny looked back at his bed with its scattered blankets. He ought to lay back down and try to get a bit of sleep before the day really started but he felt wired, totally awake. Danny dug his pants out from under some sheets and slipped them on. Opening his door he slipped down the stairs to the kitchen. He poured himself a large glass of orange juice and took a day old bagel out of the bread drawer. Then went back up to his room.

Danny didn't usually get up to watch the sun rise. He was more the type who played video games until sunrise, then went to bed. But there had been times when, wishing for some solitude, a chance to be alone, just with himself, Danny have flown up to the rooftop for a quiet hour. Setting his snack on his dresser Danny reached inside for that trigger than turned him into a ghost. With a gasp and drawn out ghostly moan he fell to the floor as the bands of light swept over his body turning himself inside out.

He lay gasping on the floor for a moment before slowly pulling himself up. He staggered over to the mirror above his dresser. In the mirror he could see that his eyes were green and glowing, his hair was white where before it had been black. So he had turned into a ghost. The pain that had exploded when he had changed had left him confused over what had happened.

Danny unzipped his jumpsuit. The silver blanket was back. Unwrapping it a bit he could see that the singed and blistered flesh was still there as well. He looked at his wounds a little more closely. Were the blisters smaller? The skin less red? Maybe. Danny hoped so.

Zipping up his jumpsuit, Danny picked up his snack and floated up through the ceiling into the open air of the roof beyond. Danny was relieved to find that using his ghost powers did not cause him any pain. It was only the transition from human to ghost that hurt. It looked like for the time being he was going to have to stay one thing or the other. Oh well.

Danny climbed up on the parapet and set down, swinging his leg over the void beneath. He took a sip of OJ before setting the glass down and started nibbling the bagel. The sun was still below the horizon but already it was coloring the clouds off in the distance a delicate rose. As he watched some of clouds were already twisting into new shapes. It was probably going to get miserably hot by afternoon but right now it was pleasantly cool.

A new day.

A new beginning.

Except for the crud left over from yesterday.

What a day that had been, Danny thought. The best part had been when his Dad have been handing out the ice cream sundaes that evening. He had handed Sam hers then paused to look at her purple camo pants and shirt closely before turning to him and asking in his usual booming voice, "Danny, who's your new friend?"

Sam had blushed and nervously answered, "Really, Mr Fenton. I'm Sam, Sam Manson. You know me."

"Oh, yes, of course," his father had agreed then had turned to Danny again and asked in his non-whisper of a whisper, "Seriously, Danny, who's your new friend."

Thank goodness he hadn't had anything in his mouth at the time or there would have been one messy spit-take.

It made him feel better that other people had trouble recognizing Sam in her new outfit too. Not that he had anything against her wearing different clothes -- or did he? Fortunately his mother had come bustling in just then, having changed into her usual jumpsuit, and asked Sam all sorts of questions about her new clothes.

Danny had once asked Jazz, his sister, what it was that Mom saw in their father because there were times when he just couldn't see how anyone could put up with his father. Jazz had talked to him for a bit about how opposite attract and things like that until he bluntly asked her if she believed any of what she was saying. Jazz had to confess she didn't. And that she couldn't understand how their mother could put up with their father, either. "But you know," Jazz had added, "Dad has always been there for Mom, he listens to her in a way he doesn't to us or anyone else. He totally like fawns over her. In my studies of other families I've found that people who have been married as long as our parents have generally don't have a lot of affection left in them. Mom and Dad are still like they just got married. I don't know, that's just how it is. It was driving me crazy until I finally decided that the only thing to do is ride out the insanity."

Of course half an hour later Jazz was screaming at their mother and threatening to run away from home. Yeah, ride out the insanity. What had that woman said in that movie, "hold on tight, it's going to be a bumpy ride"?

***

The sun was starting peek over the horizon, brightening the bottoms of the clouds and sending a sharp glare into Danny's eyes. The warmth was wane as yet but it balanced the morning chill nicely. Danny looked down between his legs to the pavement three stories below. It used to give him a little vertigo looking that far down, but since becoming able to fly heights hadn't bothered him so much. The street below was dark and empty, like a set waiting for the start of a play.

Danny broke off bits of his bagel and threw them at some pigeons that had landed on the roof near him. They would hop close to the fragments, twists their heads almost upside down to get a better look at it, then pounce and fly away. Feeding the pigeons was fun though it made it hard to find a clean place to sit on the roof.

***

So.

Yesterday.

Danny tried to order his mind. What had they learned from all their adventures. That Technus didn't know anything about it. That Clockwork didn't want to talk about it, but strangely seemed to be helping him in little things. That Ember McLain was one hot, hottie -- when she wasn't trying to kill him.

Danny's thoughts skidded to a stop as he remembered how she had looked in her prison cell all sensuous and seductive, voluptuous and desirable despite her shapeless orange prison garb. He wondered for a moment who was the hotter hottie, Ember or Paulina.

Paulina, of course, had never hypnotized him into thinking he was in love with Sam, all in an effort to kill him, so that was a plus in Paulina's favor. But next to Ember's full figure Paulina was flat, flat, flat. As flat as Sam, though come to think of it, Sam wasn't really flat at all. Nor was Paulina....

Danny shook his head. Even at a distance Ember had the power to wrap boys -- him --around her little finger. She was unmistakable hot because she trafficked in raw sexuality. But she was also greedy, devoring. She didn't just like hearing people say her name, she had to have it. It was the source of her life's blood, her energy. If he had kissed her yesterday, as he had been so tempted to do, he would have become a groveling sycophant endlessly mouthing her name.

Better to stick with the hottie who wasn't trying to suck his life out. Of course Sam hadn't tried to kill him either and she was a lot easier to talk to, and kid around, and do things together.

Something flickers across the corner of his eye. Danny froze in place, turning invisible. A couple blocks away and several hundred feet higher in the air was a metallic surfboard flying on invisible ectoplasmic impellers. On top of it rode a shapely young woman in an all-encompassing orange battlesuit. Danny didn't have to see through the mirrored visor to know who it was, Valerie Gray, one of the few other black classmates from his high school, Casper High, a girl he had dated a couple times, and another woman who wanted to kill him!

Valerie had been part of the moneyed "in" crowd at school until her father lost all their wealth in a failed business venture. Mr Gray had set up a security firm specializing in ghost-protection. Unfortunately his first client was haunted by the specter of one of their former guard dogs. "Cujo" as Danny had nicknamed him, was a playful puppy when happy but a savage demon when not. The not-happy version had destroyed the factory Mr Gray had been hired to protect. The resulting liability claims had bankrupt him. And because Danny had been spotted there (trying to capture the ghost dog) Val blamed him for her and her father's misfortunes. Some how Val had come into possession of some pretty sophisticated ghost fighting equipment, like the hoverboard, a variety of blasters and the armored battlesuit she wore. Nowadays she spent all her free time cruising the city looking for Danny Phantom.

When Val had lost all her money she lost all her friends. The only people who would still talk to her were dweebs, nerds and fellow social outcasts. People like Danny, Sam and Tucker. Val hadn't really become a better person through her poverty but she had become hard-working and motivated. She worked two or more part-time jobs after school, studied hard and accepted that she would never be part of the "in" crowd again. Danny respected that. They had dated for a while, though that had turned out to be a plot by Technus to distract Danny while the ghost of all things technical worked on his own plans. Once he realized what Technus was doing the romance was over, much to Sam and Tucker's relief. Val and Danny were still friends, but if Val ever discovered that Danny was the ghost boy she was obsessed with destroying...well, it wouldn't be pretty.

***

Danny watched Val continue her flight across the dawning skyline until she was out of sight. Confident that she wasn't doubling back he rematerialized, scaring away the flock of pigeons that had been patiently waiting for their next piece of bagel.

Danny thought back to what Clockwork had said. They didn't need his help dealing with Technus 0.7 or Boucou Buxcs. That seemed pretty unlikely since he hadn't learned anything of value from his talk with Technus in Walker's prison. The Technus who called himself 2.0.

Technus didn't remember ever being in a 0.7 mode, never heard of Boucou Buxcs, and hated the idea that someone was using him as some kind of computer virus. ("I should have thought of that!" he had screeched.) The whole trip to the prison seemed a wash though he'd want to talk to Sam and Tucker later. Maybe they'd thought of something he hadn't. Clockwork had been unhelpful on any substantiative issue but had been nice enough to fix the damage to the Speeder. Did that mean he wanted to help and couldn't? If he couldn't, who could prevent the Master of Time from doing what he wanted?

Danny thought about that for a while. He didn't know that much about the Ghost Zone. It was every bit as vast as the mortal universe. It contained all sorts of things and beings. Maybe there were things so vast they made Clockwork seem like a piker. Maybe there were things, forces, powers to which Time was as nothing. He tried to think what that would be like but all he could come up with was an old issue of a Dr. Strange comic book full of psychedelic images and general weirdness. The Ghost Zone was kind of like that but there was no Dormammu from what he could tell.

Suddenly Danny sat up straight and started to chuckle. Of course Clockwork didn't need to give them any clues -- because he knew they would soon learn all the clues they needed, when they visited the Ghost Zone Library! Not that they knew they were going to visit the Ghost Zone Library until they did. But for a ghost who could see all time all at once what they did in the future was as plain as what they had done in the past.

They had been too freaked by the sudden arrival of Walker's goons at the library to discuss everything they had learned there, which was why he wanted to get together with them, but Danny knew one thing they had learned. That someone named Beauregard C. Buchwald had experimented with digitizing ghosts. Beauregard C. Buchwald sounded a lot like Boucou or B. C. Buxcs. He had searched the Fenton Mainframe last night before going to bed and found nothing, but the Fentons weren't the only people with a massive ghost database. How was he going to get access to the Guys in White's Intranet?

He could ask. That would be good for a laugh. The Guys in White despised the Fentons. Tucker could try to hack into their system. He was pretty good about breaking into other systems, like the school's, but the Guys in White were serious people. Tucker's youth wouldn't protect him if he got caught. There was only one thing to do.

He was going to have to call another girl who wanted to kill him!

***

Abigail Farley-Smythe-Hyde was a cute red head he had meet at camp. She was the daughter of a Guy in White and had arranged to come to Camp Sleepy Hollow because she thought a ghost was haunting it. Danny had come, along with Sam and Tucker, to get away from ghosts. Abigail wanted to be a ghost hunter like her father. She just hadn't counted on the ghost being one of the meanest, vilest, most powerful specters Danny had ever run up against. It had nearly destroyed the camp and everyone in it. Afterwards The Guys in White were all over the place, including Abigail's father. Danny was lucky his parents had dropped in to retrieve him before the GIW had discovered that Danny was a ghost. For all their brilliance as paranormal researchers, his parents were strikingly blind when it came to Danny's obvious ghost powers.

For Abigail things did not end so well. Besides getting badly beaten up by the ghost, her father found out all the things she had done without his knowledge -- like breaking into the GIW mainframe, stealing (borrowing) experimental ghost technology from his desk, and not calling her father when it became obvious that she was in over her head. Her father hard been furious. Well, all the parents had been furious, but he was especially mad because his own daughter had stolen from him, abused his trust. And had shown him to be a fool for not catching her before this. That probably griped him most of all. When last Danny saw Abigail she was being threatened with the grounding of a lifetime. Because she was that kind of a girl, Danny was sure she blamed him for all of this. But he was also sure that she could still break into her father's work account and run a search for Beauregard C. Buchwald. How would he get her to do that? He had never been much good at trying to talk people into doing things for him.

Thinking about this wasn't going to get it done. He may as well do this while he was thinking about it. Abigail lived in Falls Church, Virginia, which was in the Eastern Time Zone while he was in the Central Zone. So it was an hour later there. Would that means she would be up by now?

Danny checked the chronometer built into the jumpsuit. He was astonished by how early it was. Nobody was up that early! Which meant he had time to take care of some other business. Danny kicked off from the parapet, dropping into the darkness below the rooftops.

***

Danny was running a towel over his hair as he entered the kitchen, still damp from a shower.

"Hi, Sweetie," his mother called, "How are you today?"

"Fine. What's going on?"

His parents were running around the kitchen packing a pair of oversize gym bags they called their "Action Packs."

"Haung's drugstore was robbed this morning -- by a ghost! They want us to investigate."

"They going to pay?"

"Danny! Crass money doesn't enter into a case like this," his father interjected. "This is a real ghost presence, not two hours old. Think of the information we'll learn from this!"

"Uh huh," Danny murmured than choked as he saw TV on the counter playing a security cam tape in continuous loop. A fuzzy but clearly recognizable Danny Phantom was vooming around the store piling up boxes on the checkout counter. There were tubes of antiseptic, large boxes of bandage wraps, sterile gauze. As Danny watched he saw himself pull a plastic bag from the supply under the counter, bag up everything and drop a twenty on the counter top. Cold sweat was oozing down his back as he watched. His parents stopped to watch the video from time to time but said nothing. How could they not tell that that was their own son, caught on tape, robbing the neighborhood drugstore. Were they just toying with him until he cracked?

His sister came down the stair just as his parents were charging through the front door. She was wearing a long Tee shirt for a nightgown. She took one look at the TV which still played the surveillance tape. "What are you doing on TV," she asked then looked at the tape again.

"What have you done?" she demaned in an appalled voice. "Daniel Fenton, stealing, I can't believe you did that!"

"I can explain."

"How can you explain this?"

"I paid for everything. I was more like shopping before the store opened."

Jazz looked at him sternly. "I thought you promised you would never turn into Dark Danny?"

"This isn't Dark Danny."

"Then how can you explain this."

"I got shot yesterday, while in the Ghost Zone with Sam and Tucker. I've got a big burn on my chest, at least I do when I'm a ghost." He beat back her hands which were trying to pull up his shirt. "When I turn back normal it's gone. I needed to clean it up this morning and put a new dressing on it. But if I took stuff out of the burn kit Mom would know. And since I couldn't sleep this morning I decided to go out and get stuff before the store opened. I'm OK, Jazz. Really. But what about this tape. We can't just leave it lying around here. I mean eventually they're going to realize that's me in the video."

"That's simply," Jazz, walking over the TV. She pressed a button on the panel. "Oops, I hit 'record' instead of 'off' My bad for recording over their video..."

His sister turned to him and asked "What would you do without me?"

***

Danny had a bowl of cereal for breakfast before going back up to his room. Time to gird his loins, whatever a gird was, and make the call. He found her number on a business card she's handed him back at camp. Who else would have business cards at 14, he wondered. The card was top class he decided. Quality slick paper, raised lettering and well printed color pictures of unicorns on the corners holding up a banner reading:

Abigail Farley-Smythe-Hyde

Falls Church, VA

in a looping script font with her telephone number and email account under it. It was pretty frilly looking for the business card of someone who intended to be a ghost fighter.

The phone rang, and rang and rang. Danny was about to hang up when there was a faint click and a sullen: "What?"

"Abigail? Hi! it's Danny, Danny Fenton. How are you."

"Like you care."

"What do you mean? You asked me to call you sometime, and I am."

"I'm not an idiot, Fenton. The only reason you're calling is because you want something from me."

Danny was stumped for what to say. This call was not going like he had thought.

After a long pause, he heard: "What's the matter Fenton, cat got your tongue? Did I hit a raw nerve, hurt your feelings? Good!"

The phone clicked off.

Danny slumped to the edge of his bed. Now what? he wondered.

He flipped his phone open again and hit redial. It rang six times before she picked up. "Wow, you are desperate" she said by way of hello,

"Abigail, please don't hang up. I need your help."

"You mean you need something from my father's computer."

"Am I that transparent?" Danny wondered. "Please, it's really important." he said.

"Oh, come on. You never liked me at camp and now, out of the blue, you're calling?"

"I liked you," Danny interrupted.

"Then why you did you always try to avoid me or glare at me every time we talked about fighting that ghost?"

"It's complicated."

"I have plenty of time for you to explain, since, thanks to you, I'm grounded for the rest of the summer."

"Ouch."

"And you, I bet, got off with nothing."

"Because I didn't do anything."

"Yeah, you always did duck on the battles with the ghost."

"I was there! You just didn't see me because you had already been knocked unconscious." Danny argued. He had been there, of course, but as Danny Phantom, not Danny Fenton, something he had worked hard to keeping Abigail from finding out.

"The rangers did say they found you holding that Goth girl and crying like she had died or something." Abigail seemed to be relenting.

Danny hated anyone saying that he cried, ever. Guys don't cry. But the truth was that he had thought that Sam had died when she had broken the skull that had anchored the camp ghost to the mortal plane. And he had never felt so devastated in his life.

"Sam...." he said, and hesitated. "Her name is Sam, not 'that Goth girl.' She saved you life. She saved everyone's life."

"Yeah, whatever. So what's so important that you had to call me?"

"You remember Tucker's friend, T'Keisha?"

"Tall, skinny girl; had cornrows, didn't she?"

"Right. Well, she was attacked by a ghost two nights ago.. A ghost attached to an E-mail, like it were a virus."

"That's different." Abigail agreed. "How do you know it was attached to an E-Mail and didn't just co-incidentally appear?"

Danny recounted what had happened two nights before. Abigail interrupted a couple times to clarify an issue. There was an eagerness to her voice previously missing.

"So you want me to break into my father's computer and look up this Boucou Buxcs?"

"If you would."

"What do I get out of this?"

"I'd really appreciate it."

"Not good enough. I'm grounded for the rest of summer. I can't leave the house, can't have friends over, can't use the computer except for one hour each night to read E-mail. I'm not even supposed to leave me room except to eat meals. He's treating me like a prisoner. What do you think he's going to do if he catches me doing it again?"

"Then you can unlock his computer. 'Cause I wasn't sure you could. Maybe he had changed the password or something."

"He did change the password. But jeeze, he's dumb. I guessed the new password on my third try. "

"I guess that's not much else to do when you're housebound all day."

"And it's all your fault."

"Mine!"

"If you had called in your father when I had asked..."

"I was the one telling you to call in _your_ father. My father is a paranormal researcher. _Your_ father is an officer of the court deputized to deal with ghostly manifestations. If I had called my dad he would have called your dad because that's what the law requires."

"Poppycock! Your father would have been down here in a flash with a ton of heavy weapons, just as he was when you finally did call him."

"I never called him. That was the Head Ranger's doing."

"Whatever. The point is law or no law your father would have come down, helped us out and never bothered the Guys in White."

"Abby, I'm not the one who broke into Guys in White Computer system, or stole proprietary, experimental equipment from the Guys in White, or lie to her father about why you wanted to go to a camp 600 miles away from your home. I went to Camp Sleepy Hollow to get away from ghosts. You went there to find a ghost. Everything that happened there afterwards, happened because of what you did."

"You're saying it's _my fault_ I nearly got killed by that ghost?"

"I'm sorry you got hurt. I'm sorry I couldn't do more to have prevented that." All of his friends at camp had been badly injured while fighting the ghost. Danny had used every means and tactic at his disposal to fight the ghost. Had taken a pounding from it, but as a ghost his wounds had healed quickly. The others... Sam still had nightmares. Something he wished he could take away from her, but how do you fight sick thought?

"That's not good enough, Fenton," Abigail snarled back into the phone and clicked it shut.

***

Danny slowly closed his phone and lay back on his bed. Now what? he wondered. He'd blown his best chance to get information from the Guys in White databank by arguing with Abigail. She's never listen to him if he called back.

He was about to toss his phone on his desk and take a short nap before looking up Sam and Tucker when the phone rang. He was astonished to see calling ID saying "Virginia Call."

"Hello?" He answered tentatively.

"Look if you want that information you've got to do something for me."

"Sure, whatever I can."

"Good. First, I want you to keep me posted on your investigation. I want to hear everything. I wish I could be with you fighting this Technus 0.7 thing but at least hearing about what you're doing is better than nothing. This is the most interesting thing I've heard about all month."

"Sure."

"Secondly,"

"There's more?"

"A lot more. I want you to come visit me."

"What? I can't just drop everything and drive six hundred miles just to visit you. I am too young to drive."

"You've got that other thing, the ghostmobile. The one your father keeps crashing."

"You mean the Specter Speeder, but what makes you think I can fly that?"

"Like you haven't tried to fly it. I know if I were in your position I'd be flying it all over the place." Danny gulped, because it was true. "Besides, since your father wrangled an exemptions from the FAA regarding flight certification there's no requirement that you have to have a license to fly it."

"You have been busy on your father's computer." Danny shuddered. "What else do you know about us?"

"Plenty. I figure you can 'borrow' the ghostmobile and get here in about three hours time. We can run around the city some and you can get back before anyone notices that you or it are missing."

"I can't do that."

"You want me to go behind my father back to get you information, I think you can go behind your father's back, too."

"But..."

"Those are my terms, Danny."

"Abby, be reasonable."

"It's Abigail. I hate 'Abby' that's what my father calls me. Say that name again and you can kiss you precious datamining good bye. Well, what's it going to be."

"Tomorrow."

"Not tomorrow, I want an answer now."

"I said I'd be there tomorrow. I've got to think up a cover story and it's too long a trip to start today."

"Great. See you at Nine. Don't come early, my father doesn't leave for work until Eight-Thirty. Bye,"

She hung up.

What have I done?" Danny wondered. I am so screwed. How do I explain this to Sam? I can't believe I just made a date with a crazy girl on the other side of the country.

Just then the phone rang.

"God, you cave easily," Abigail continued as if she hadn't just hung-up on him. "I was sure I was going to have to argue harder to get you to come." then she gave him directions for finding her house and a couple suggestions for where to hide the Specter Speeder.

Danny fell back onto his bed, shaking his head. He couldn't believe he had just made a date with a crazy ghost-hunter. "I have got to start dating a better class of women," he thought. He closed his eyes, for what he thought was just a moment, and woke at 11:30. With a shout of alarm, he jumped up and rushed off to meet Sam and Tucker at the Nasty Burger.


	5. Chapter 5

Viral Attack 5 - A Walk in the Park -- with Landmines.

How do you dress for a date with a crazy women? Danny wondered as he looked through his closet. Should he wear a jacket, dress shirt and tie? The orange jumpsuit his father always wanted him to wear was stuck in the back of the closet. It had 'FentonWorks' stitched over the heart. That certainly would remind Abigail that this wasn't a 'date;' It was strictly business. But he would be in the stupid jumpsuit all day. That was more humiliation than Danny needed. In the end he decided on a clear pair of jeans and the usual Tee. That would say he didn't think there was anything different or important their outing. Just plain ol' Danny flying 600 miles to drop in on a casual friend, who would kill him in an instant if she ever found out he was a half-ghost. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.....

Down in lab Danny walked past the Specter Speer on its cradle, opening instead and slipping into the Weapons Vault. His folks kept their most dangerous inventions here. Mostly to keep them from blowing up the house if they accidentally discharged. The vault was built of six inch thick titanium steel.

Pushed up against one wall was a seven foot tall metal man. The Fenton Super-Suit. It could amplify one's strength a hundred fold. Danny had used the Mk 1 to put Pariah Dark back into his sarcophagus-prison. This was the Mk 2. The first one had disappeared 'mysteriously,' though Danny and Jazz knew what had become of it.

Danny climbed inside and attached the cybernetic interfaces before powering up the suit. A quick check of the instrumentation showed that his father hadn't tinkered with the suit in a while. One never knew what his father would think to add or remove from something he was tinkering on.

With the suit powered up, Danny walked out of the weapons vault, closed the door, and crossed the lab to the mouth of the Specter Speeder's launch tunnel. He manually opened the inner door, activated the suit's impellers and cruised down the tunnel and out through the exit hidden under the backyard swimming pool. Once out in the open he opened up the suit's drive. Where the speeder could cruise at 200 miles per hour, twice as fast as Danny could fly as a ghost, the super-suit could cruise right up near the speed of sound, 600 miles per hour. He could reach Falls Church, Va where Abigail Farley-Smythe-Hyde live in just over an hour. And more importantly, get back home in just over an hour, greatly reducing the amount of time he had to cover for. And unlike the Specter Speeder, which sat right out in the open where it was sure to be noticed if it were 'borrowed,' no one was likely to enter the Weapons Vault that day so there was a good chance no one would notice that the suit was missing.

Danny flew as close to the ground as he could, to avoid FAA radar picking him up. But he couldn't fly as low as he'd like because even though he wasn't making a sonic boom, 600 mph is still pretty noisy. People would notice.

The on-board flight computer lead him straight to Fall Church, VA and to the address Abigail had given him. He found the old culvert she had mentioned easily and landed quietly and unobserved beside it. The culvert was eight feet high and covered with a heavy wire fence to keep homeless people for camping out in it. But it was easy for the super-suit to bend up a corner for him to slip through. He pulled the wire grate partially back in place, leaving just enough of a gap for a fourteen year old kid to slip through. Putting the super suit on "Sleep" mode, he popped open the back hatch and crawled out. He closed and locked the hatch in place with a conventional looking electronic car lock. Instead of beeping like a normal lock, this placed a bar from 'La Cuchacracha.' Danny rolled his eyes. What was his father thinking?

Danny scrambled up the slope of the ditch, avoiding what looked suspiciously like poison ivy. Abigail's directions lead him three blocks down then four blocks to the right, in a neighborhood of large, expensive houses, often behind fences, on large lots. The houses seemed ostentatious to Danny, who was used to run down brownstone rowhouses in Amity Park. Those looked like places people lives. These looked like....Danny couldn't think of a word. They just weren't the sort of place he'd want to live in.

Abigail's house was a faux Tudor building sitting on a good sized corner lot. A horseshoe drive sweep up from the street to the portico covered front door and back. A narrow lane split off leading to the rear where Danny surmised there was a garage.

Summoning his courage, Danny stepped off the sidewalk and walked up the drive.

The door popped open before Danny had time to ring the bell. There was a squeal of "Danny!" and he was engulfed in a tangle of arms; hot lips crushing against his.

After a long minute Danny had to turn his face freeing up his mouth to gasp "--n't -- mother -- home?"

"Oh, yeah." Abigail bounced back, pulled the front door closed and looping her arm around Danny's and all but dragged him off the porch. It wasn't until they were down the drive and hidden by the hedges along the sidewalk that she slowed up to a leisurely stroll.

"I am so glad you could make it," she cried, hugging his arm tighter.

"I didn't have much choice if I wanted to find out what the Guys in White know about Boucou Buxcs."

"Oh, lighten up. We are going to have so much fun today. I haven't been out of the house in a month. I felt like a prisoner in there."

"You will be again if your Dad catches you doing this." Danny warned.

"It's not going to happen! The old fart never comes home before six, and Agatha leaves in an hour or so for her club. She gets back at five sharp for Dr. Phil. No one -- absolutely no one -- ever bother to check on me during the day!"

"Who's Agatha?"

"My mother. Right now she's watching Montel do another "Baby Daddy" show -- paternity testing --" Abigail explained at Danny puzzled look, "I think she's trying to figure out how to prove I'm not her daughter."

"Why?"

"She thinks I gave her thick ankles, or something."

Danny looked to see if she was joking but found it hard to tell. Instead he asked, "What's up with the clothes?"

"Don't like the way I'm dressed?" She asked, stepping back and making a slow, fashion model spin. Abigail was wearing a long-sleeved white collared shirt buttoned up to the neck. Red roses and green leaves were embroidered around the collar. A matching floral design was stitched over her left breast. The shirt hung over white jeans with red, yellow and orange daisies running down the leg.

"No. it's nice. I just sort of expected you to be wearing something a little more..." Danny fumbled for the right word, "like what you did at camp."

"Miss the shorts?" she teased.

"You have nice legs." Danny flustered.

"Oh, my god, you were looking! I thought you only had eyes for that Goth girl." Abigail giggled, "There's hope for you yet, Fenton"

"Let's leave Sam out of this. But what's the deal with the long sleeves and pants in August? It must be a hundred degrees out."

"This." Abigail suddenly pulled the bottom of her shirt up exposing her torso. Beige bandages were wrapped around her chest in thick layers covering her from her belly button to her armpit. Danny was as much shocked that she would expose herself that way as by the mass of bandages covering her.

"Oh right, You broke some ribs." He said, trying to be cool. "They haven't healed yet?"

"I'll probably be starting school wrapped up like this. I feel like a mummy."

"Ouch. Do they hurt?"

"If I cough they hurt like heck and I've got to be careful about making sudden movements. But I could have worn a nice scoop neck Tee over that. It's all the other cuts and scraps I have to worry about."

She pushed up the sleeve of her shirt exposing a number of white lines running along her arm.

"They look like they're healing well." Danny offered.

"Yeah, but the plastic surgeon said I had to keep them away from sunlight until they've fully healed else they'll tan differently from the rest of my skin."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Bummer. It's 90 degrees in DC and I have to dress like its winter. I can't even go outside to the pool."

"I thought that was because you said your father forbid you from even leaving your room?"

"Well, since I can't go outside..."

"But he didn't actually ban you from using your pool."

"I can't have any friends over, so what's the point."

"Just that he hasn't grounded you as badly as you were letting on. And obviously he didn't take away your cellphone so your friends could have called at any time. They just haven't called, have they?"

Abigail stopped and pulled away from Danny. "So I exaggerated a little. This is the first time I've been out of the house since that fiasco at camp. And yes, you are the first person to come visit and yes I had to blackmail you to get you to do that. Do you think that doesn't hurt? But I don't want to think about that. I want to have fun today. I want to enjoy myself because this is probably the last time I'll get to have any fun before school starts. I hate school"

"And that stuff you said you'd look up for me, was that another of your exaggerations?" Danny was furious to think that he'd gone to so much trouble, risked getting into so much trouble, for someone who just wanted a day out. "Can you really, still log into the GIW computers?"

"That's all this is for you, isn't it. Getting some stupid information out of me."

"Yes, but at least I never said it was anything else."

Danny was getting nervous about the way they were just standing there in the middle of the sidewalk, yelling at each other while other pedestrians had to walk around them. He reached for Abigail's hand but she pulled away. "Look," he said. "We can either do this thing or just forget about it."

Abigail turned and started walking along the sidewalk again, refusing his hand, hugging her arms around her. "I've got a folder up in my room with everything you wanted.," she said to the air, assuming that Danny was following. "There's nothing about a Boucou Buxcs. Are you sure about the spelling?"

"That's how Tucker said it was spelled on the E-mail."

"And the other guy Beauregard C. Buchwald, is a consultant with the GIW. Must be an old guy. He's held contracts since the 60s. Mostly to do with theories about ghost communications.

"I didn't lie about having access. And I didn't lie about not seeing any of my friends." Abigail insisted.

Danny didn't say anything but came along side the angry girl. "I'm sorry I accused you of lying," he offered.

"But you were right. You were right about everything." She started crying and sat down on a short wall running alongside the sidewalk. "How can you bear to be always right?" she sobbed.

"Always being right is my sister's job. I'm the doofus in the family." He sat down beside, put an arm around her shoulder. After a moment he went on, "You were right back at camp. I should have called my father. I thought we could handle it but I had no idea how much more powerful and malevolent the ghost had become. If I had known, I would have called 'cause I didn't want anyone to get hurt. And you, and Sam, and everyone ended up in the hospital." He paused in thought. "I never intended for that to happen. So I was wrong. I'm wrong about a lot of stuff. I'm sorry you got grounded, I'm sorry your friends never call."

"How can you be sorry for people you've never even met?" She asked, trying to force a laugh. Abigail was dabbing her eyes with a bit of tissue she had pulled from her pocket. "I've got to stop doing this," she said after a moment.

"Doing what?"

"Crying. There's no crying in the Guys in White."

"I thought that was baseball."

"Same thing. Yeah. let's do this thing. It's probably the only time I'll get to run around DC with a cute boy."

"What cute boy?" Danny asked.

Abigail smiled and punched him in the ribs.

"So what are we going to do first?" Danny asked with false heartiness.

"You're the visitor, I guess we should do whatever you want to."

"I've never been to DC before. There's so many things to see."

"There's the Zoo, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Viet Nam Memorial..."

"I know exactly what I want to see,"

***

Danny peered through the small porthole and breathed, "Can you imagine living in there for a whole week?"

Abigail, trying not to look as bored as she was, bent down to look into the porthole of the Apollo capsule. She should have know. It was right there in Danny's Guys in White dossier. She had read it intently the night before. Career Goal: Astronaut. Where else would a space cadet want to go but the Air and Space Museum!

Through the porthole she saw three couches in a row in a cabin the size of a closet. A couple feet in front of the couches were panel after panel of switches, hundred, thousands of switches. Not only couldn't she see herself spending a week in such a tiny place, she couldn't see herself spending a hour there without going stark raving mad.

"Where's the bathroom?" she asked, trying to feign interest in Danny's hobby.

"There is no bathroom."

"They had to hold it in for a week?"

Danny blushed. "No, they had to -- ah -- go in little plastic bags."

"Ewww."

"Well, yeah. But these were like the first guys to ever stand on the moon. Think about it-- in all history only twelve guys have stood on the moon. I think I could put up with going into a ziplock for a week to be able to say that."

"Not me. Come on, Danny, there's lots of things I want to do today, let's not spend it all inside here."

"All right," Danny sighed. "But there's one last thing I want to see before we go. Come on, I think you'll like this."

He lead her back towards the center of the museum. In a large room filled with various rockets, satellites, and experimental space craft stood a huge cylinder reaching from the floor to the ceiling. A bridge reached out to it from the second floor balcony allowing people to walk through part of the structure. Even early in the day there was a bit of a line to get in.

"What is this?" Abigail asked while waiting their turn to enter.

"Skylab II. This isn't just some mock-up or training facility. This is a full and complete space station. Just like Skylab. Ready to launch at any time. There was even a Saturn V available to send it aloft."

"So what's it doing here?"

Danny didn't answer for a moment. They were inside the silvery tower and Danny was enrapt by the spectacle. They could look down through the clear plastic floor the length of the cylinder. Every bit of surface was covered with instrumentation, covered storage bins, sleeping hammock and more. Wire mesh panels formed two floors though in weightlessness the purpose of floors was a little pointless.

"There was no money to spend on launching it. AS it was NASA only made three trips to Skylab I before abandoning it. They had to pour all their money into building the Shuttle. Once the shuttle was flying NASA planned to send it back to Skylab, perhaps as early as the Shuttle's second flight. Mostly to bump it back up into a higher orbit. That was supposed to happen in 1979 but the Shuttle was running late. It didn't fly until 1981. By then Skylab had fallen out of orbit. It splashed down all over western Australia. NASA even had an Apollo-Saturn available for a mission to push Skylab into a higher orbit. But it costs so much just to launch a rocket, even when the hardware has already been paid for."

Danny sighed. "If they had spent the extra money, kept Skylab aloft those couple extra years until the shuttle was flying we could have had a manned space station years before the International Space Station. We could have given the Russians a run for their money on manned presence in space."

"In this?" Abigail was dubious.

"Sure. Look how big it is. And think what it would have been like if we had launched both Skylabs and docked them together? And once the shuttle was running we could have continued hauling modules up, expanding on all this."

"Sounds nice," Abigail said to be polite.

Danny ran his hand over the wall beside him. There was plastic sheeting screwed over the actual wall to protect it from what Danny was doing, but he didn't seem to mind.

"This--this is what I want to do with my life," he said. After a moment, he sighed again. "Come on, let's go."

***

They walked back onto the Mall without speaking. The Capitol building was to their right, shining white in the morning sunlight. To the left stretched the length of the Mall, down towards the Washington Monument and beyond, far in the distance, the Lincoln Memorial.

"We did what I wanted to do," Danny said, "So it's your turn to pick something to do."

"There's a new exhibit on ghost breaking at the Justice Building I'd love to see but the old fart works there and I don't want to take the chance of running into him." Abigail led Danny down the Mall. They walked slowly on the gravel paths that lined the sides of the grass.

"There's the Natural History Museum," she pointed across the grass to a large grey building. People were lined up to go into it. "The dinosaurs are kind of fun to look at."

"I like dinosaurs but you don't sound that enthused."

"Let's just walk down to the Washington Monument. I've been grounded for a month so just being outside is kind of nice."

She again took Danny's arm in hers and walked, leaning against him.

"So how did you get away from your family?" she asked.

I told them there was a Gaming Tournament across town. And that I had to leave early to help set up. And stay late to help clean up."

"What did you tell your two friends?"

Danny hesitated. "I told them I would be out of town on some corporate business."

"Corporate business? How convenient."

"I hate lying to my friends."

"Why didn't you just tell them the truth?"

Danny couldn't think of an answer. "Why is your father so opposed to you becoming a Guy In White?" he asked instead.

"I don't know. Sometimes I think he thinks women shouldn't work."

"That sounds retarded."

"Retarded? Yeah, that's him -- 'The retard'."

"You don't much like your father, do you." Danny wondered.

"All he ever does is tell me what I've done wrong. He gets upset if I ever suggest I'd like to be a ghost-breaker like him, he never takes me to his job..."

"I never get away from Dad's job," Danny interrupted. "Sometimes I envy your situation."

"At least your father cares about you. Mine..."

"I think you're being too harsh."

"You wouldn't think so if you had to live with him." Abigail snapped.

"So why do you want to be a Guy in White. Or would you be a Girl in White?"

" 'Guy' -- I'd be a Guy in White."

"Even though you're a girl."

"Whatever. I want to be a Gal in White -- OK? -- because that's the cutting edge of law enforcement. Every day there is something new being developed in the detection, capture and containment of ghosts. That, and no two ghosts are alike. Life would never be boring."

"I'd love a little boring in my life."

"How can you say that? Life as an astronaut would hardly be boring? Don't rockets blow up all the time?"

"Not all the time. In fact they almost never blow up. I want to be an astronaut because I've always wanted to see what is out there, go places where no one has ever gone before."

"But if they ever develop a portal to the Ghost Zone, that would be some place where no one has ever been before. Wouldn't exploring the Ghost Zone be just as interesting?"

"Nah, it's boring."Danny answered without thinking.

"Boring? Wait a minute! You make it sound like you've been there."

"What? No! No, no, no." Danny demurred in a panic. "How could I visit the Ghost Zone? No one has a working portal."

"Not even your parents?

"No. Believe me, if their portal ever works my Dad will be sure to tell the world."

"Oh." Abigail seemed not entirely convinced of that. Danny, himself, wasn't entirely sure whether his parents knew that their Portal actually worked. Sometimes his parents acted like they knew if worked, such as the time they added a biometric lock on the portal so only a Fenton could open it, but it also was true that Jack Fenton would not stop telling the world that he had created a portal if he knew it worked. Danny's unique existence, of course, results from his walking into the interface tunnel as the dimensional energies were collapsing. He had been twisted through multi-dimensional space and replicated in ectoplasm. That was how he could be both a normal kid and a ghost.

"You know, someone must have a working on Ghost Zone portal since these E-mail's from Boucou Buxs come from the Ghost Zone," Danny sought to change the subject.

"Which is what Dr. Buchwald was studying," Abigail said. "From what I've read of his dossier he never quite succeeded either. At least he could never reliably demonstrate communications with ghosts."

"But how does one digitize a ghost and attach it to an E-mail? Did Buchwald study that as well?"

"I don't know. I didn't have time to read everything I downloaded."

They had come down the length of the Mall to a street separating the Mall from the Washington Monument. Danny saw a bench under some trees and lead Abigail over.

"I didn't realize the Mall was so long," he said.

"This is only half of it. The rest continues from Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. They've got an elevator in the Washington Monument. You can ride to the top and look out over the whole city. Let's do that. I went there once on a school outing. It seems like the only times I've been in DC have been on school trips. The old fart never thinks of bringing me here."

"So this is as much new to you as it is to me?" Danny asked.

"Yeah, I guess so."

They sat in the shade for a moment, then crossed the street and climbed slope up to the foot of the monument. Danny brought tickets for the elevator then they walked around it while waiting for their turn. Danny pulled out his cellphone to take some pictures before remembering that since he had told no one of this trip he couldn't show them any pictures. Abigail suggested that he could always just keep them as a private memory but Danny wasn't convinced. The best kept secrets he suspected were ones that had no evidence.

His vow to take no pictures was sorely tested when they got to the top of the Washington Monument and could look out over the entire city. Because of the law limiting the height of construction in Washington, DC the view was unlimited. The whole city lay out before them like a map. They moved from one small window to the next, giving little cries of delight with each new view. Too soon they had to ride the elevator back down so the next group of tourists could come up.

Danny suggested they continue on to the Lincoln Memorial. The distance was great but they were young and didn't think it was a problem. Danny asked Abigail about her school, not wanting to talk any more about ghost, ghost-fighting, or parents. They chatted animatedly the length of the reflecting pool, before climbing the long flights of stairs to the monument.

They had seen many pictures of the statue inside the Lincoln Memorial but none of them really conveyed the awesome size and dignity of the statue. It was hard to look at it and not be momentarily proud to be an American. Intensely proud.

And then some young man jumped that barrier keeping tourists off the statue. He wore baggy shorts and a Tee shirt advertizing a punk rock band Danny had never heard of. He jumped on the base of the statue, turned to face a friend who held a camera and raised his arms in triumphant. The camera flashed and a second later the man had leaped off the statue and was mingling with the crowd.

"Bastard," Abigail growled. Danny had to agree. "Ruining it for everyone else."

But the man had hardly rejoined his friend with the camera when a half dozen Park Service Rangers surrounded him. Danny looked on, amazed, as the man was swiftly cuffed and lead off to a service elevator discretely built into a wing of the building.

"Well." Abigail said after a stunned moment. "Sometimes justice does get serviced."

"Yeah. And yet I never saw any guards around here." Danny agreed.

They went back out side and joined the crowds sitting on the steps. Danny glanced at Abigail in the mid-day sun, then looked at her again. He frowned

"What's the matter, Danny?" she asked. "Don't tell me I have a zit."

"You look awfully red in the face. Do you feel all right?"

"I'm fine," she snapped, but fumbled in her pants before pulling out a small compact. The inside lid was a mirror. She peered at herself in the glass."

"Snap!" She cried. "I'm getting sun burned! I forgot to put on any sunblock before leaving the house. Dad is sure to notice." She burned her head in her hands. "What am I going to do?"

"Maybe you're just overheated," Danny suggested. "Why do we find some shade and I'll get us some water from one of the vendors down there." He pulled her to her feet and lead her down the steps. Abigail followed blindly, more interested in studying her reflection in the mirror. "I am so dead," she murmured.

She followed Danny over to one of the souvenir shacks. While Danny was selecting a couple drinks Abigail went through the selection of hats there. "How do I look?" she asked, wearing a super-tall red, white and blue top hat. Danny just shook his head. Next she tried on a plastic imitation straw boater, which caused Danny to roll his eyes. After a couple more hats more goofy than practical she selected a wide brimmed straw hat with a low crown and a sprig of paper flowers stuck in the hatband. Danny joined her with a bottle of a popular sports drink for each of them. Abigail picked up a tube of sunblock and paid for her two items. She sat down on a nearby bench and started rubbing the lotion over her face. "Any better?" she asked.

"Maybe. Hey, you hungry? How 'bout I get us a couple sausages from that vendor over there?"

They sat and eat in quiet for a while. Abigail continued to monitor her appearance in her mirror. As Danny was carrying their trash over to a barrel she appeared to make up her mind, put the compact away, put on her hat and rushed over to Danny and pulled him off towards a taxi stand.

"We have just enough time to visit the zoo before we have to go home," she explained. "Maybe if we're luck the pandas will be out playing."

The zoo was pleasant even though the pandas were not out. In fact they seemed to be hiding. Abigail pointed to a white lump in a deep corner of their enclosure than didn't look like just of anything which she claimed to be one of the pandas, but that was OK. There were other animals to look at. Admittedly many of them were also resting/hiding from the heat of the day. Danny found himself frequently holding hands with Abigail as they walked. It just seemed natural to do at the time. Then when he became self-conscious of what he was doing he'd get cold shivers remembering the last time he felt comfortable holding as girl's hand. Valerie Grey. His Casper High classmate and self-declared ghost hunter. "Not again," a voice in his head would whisper. "She'll never find out," a voice from somewhere lower would answer.

"Danny, you are such an idiot!" That was Sam. Danny didn't recall just when she had said that but truer words he had never heard.

They were dwaddling over a frozen lemonade when Abigail glanced at her watch and cursed. "We're late," she said. "It's a long hike to the Metro station. We've got to go."

She set a rapid pace that Danny found hard to keep up with. And it was a long walk before the Metro station appeared. They sat down on the train and leaned against each other, Now that they had a chance to relax they realized just how tired they were. Danny was almost falling asleep when the Falls Church stop was announced.

They caught the bus to her house, getting out a stop early and walking the rest of the way. Around the corner from her driveway Abigail thrust her arm into the hedge, felt around and pulled out a thick manila folder wrapped in plastic. "Here's the stuff you wanted Danny."

"Thanks." He held on to the folder for a moment, feeling awkward, unsure of next to say.

"It's probably best if we split up here," Abigail said. She pulled off her hat and unceremoniously stuffed it and the tube of sunblock in a trash can. "So if I get caught sneaking back into the house you won't get into any trouble."

"Ok. You sure you're going to be alright? What about, you know, your face?"

"I think I can cover it up with foundation. If not, I'll just have to be sick for a couple days and hide in bed. Don't worry. I'll be alright."

"Ok. Ah -- thanks for all this information."

"Thanks for the day out and for telling me about this new ghost. Let me know how it all works out. I'm dying to know what's going on."

"Sure, I'll keep you updated."

"Well, I guess this is it."

"Yeah."

They stood there for a moment. Then Danny suddenly bent down and kissed Abigail. He kind of missed her lips. She threw her arms around him and pressed tight.

She was blushing when they finally split. "Thanks," she whispered. "This has been a wonderful day."

"Yeah. I had a good time, too."

She turned and ran around the corner. Danny stood there until he heard a door close, then he found his way back to the super-suit.

***

The suit was exactly as he had left it. Stuffing the folder into his waistband, he climbed into the super-suit and connected the cybernetic controls. The suit responded like a second skin, walked to the grate covering the culvert and bent it out of the way. Once on the outside he bent it back in place. A built in laser cannon let him spotweld the grate back in place. Danny activated the impellers and the autopilot. The suit flew itself back home while he took a short nap.

He flew back in by way of the Specter Speeders launch tube and parked the suit back in the weapons vault. He found a small mirror in the lab and checked his own appearance. He, too, was a little sunburned but hoped his parents wouldn't notice. There was something reddish on the corner of his mouth. He rubbed at it, found it was lipstick. He rubbed at his mouth some more, until he thought he had got all of it. The last thing he wanted was for Sam to catch him with lipstick on his face. She wouldn't understand. It was just a kiss. They were just friends. It wasn't anything serious.... "Who am I kidding," Danny thought. He had crossed a line by going on this "not-date" with Abigail. If Sam ever found out she would be royally pissed.

Danny hiked back down the launch tunnel out into the back yard, climbed over the fence and dropped into the alley behind their house. He walked around to the front and walked through the front door.

"I'm home," he called.

"Hey, Danny, my boy, how were your games?" Her father was in the living room, idling eating a hot fudge sundae and watching TV.

"Ok. I had a good time."

"How did you finish?" his father asked. Danny frozen, wondering if his father was trying to trap him in a lie. But no, his father wasn't the subtle type.

"Seventh. Not my best outing, but I had some stiff competition."

"I'm sure you'll do better next time. Hey, Danny, want some ice cream? The fudge is still hot."

"It's Ok, Dad. I'm pretty tired. I think I'll go straight to bed."

Upstairs Danny drew the folder out from under his tee shirt and flopped on his bed. He began leafing through the pages. He had been at it for a while when something made him sit up in surprise. He lay the sheet on his desk and began tearing through the pages he had already read and laid aside. Finding the sheet he was looking for, Danny compared the two closely. Puzzled, he reached for his cellphone and pulled up Abigail's number.

"I was about to call you," she said, answering her phone on the second ring.

"Huh?"

"Yeah, remember that ghost you were talking about, Technus 0.7?"

"Yeah..."

"Well, tonight when I was allowed to go on-line I found an E-mail from you..."

"But I never..."

"I know. I mean, at first I thought it was from you, which I thought was really sweet, but when I saw that it contained an attachment I recalled what you said had happened to your other friends. So I looked at the time it was sent. You were still with me then, so I knew it was a fake."

"What did you do about the ghost?" Danny was suddenly very worried.

"First, I did not open the attachment. Instead I found a can of Fenton Ghost-Be-Gone and liberally sprayed my computer with it. Then I opened the attachment. A ghost who looked a lot like the renderings of Technus on the GIW mainframe appeared and tried to take over my monitor but it hit the Ghost-Be-Gone spray and kind of sizzled away. I opened the attachment three more times and the same thing happened each time."

"Don't open it," Danny said. "You're asking for trouble."

"Relax. I stopped after the third time. I know the anti-ghost spray eventually evaporates. I wasn't going to risk Technus attacking our house. We have way too much technology."

"So what did you did?"

"Nothing, really. As long as I don't open the attachment nothing's going to happen."

"Don't depend on that. Did you tell your dad?"

"The retard?"

"Abigail, this is like camp all over again. Tell your father!"

"Tell him what?"

"Just tell him you heard from me about a ghost virus, and then you got one on your computer. He'll take the computer to work. They'd find the ghost and deal with it."

"I can't let the old man read my computer. There's too much stuff on it that I can't have him read!"

"Can't you delete that stuff first?"

"Come on, Danny, stuff is never completely deleted from a computer unless you melt down the hard drive."

"Oh. So you're not going to tell your father -- again."

"There's nothing to tell. I found a problem and I dealt with it. End of story."

"Ahhhh...."

"So why were you going to call? Couldn't get me out of your mind?"

"It was about these papers you got for me."

"Something wrong with them?"

"There's something odd here. One paper is a research paper published three years ago. Another is an obituary for Buchwald dated four years ago."

"So?' Abigail sounded confused on the phone.

"So he died a year before he published this paper. A paper on the digitalization of Ectoplasmic structures on electronic media."

"He was scanning ghosts into his computer?"

"Apparently. A year after he died!"

"After he died?" Abigail sounded puzzled but curious.

"After he died," Danny repeated.

"That's worth looking into," Abigail said. "I'll see what I can dig out on my end. Was there anything else?"

"That's as far as I've read."

"OK. Keep in touch."

"Abigail, what about the ghost on your computer?"

"I've got that under control, Danny. I'm not a helpless girl, you know. I can deal with things like this."

Danny recognized that there was nothing he could say that would change her mind. He wished her a good night instead, and hung up. There wasn't anything else he could do.

He closed his phone and placed it on his desk. Picked up the two sheets of paper, one the article and the other the obituary and looked at them closely, as if he could wring more information out of them. With a sigh he laid them back down on his desk, lay back on his bed and closed his eyes. He was still trying to figure out what they meant when he fell asleep.


	6. Chapter 6

Viral Attack - Chapter 6

Good Fortune Is Best Seen in Hindsight

The car, a mid-size Chevy, five or six years old, tore through the intersection with all the speed and conviction of a man who knows he has the right of way, only to be T-boned by a black Taurus traveling through a green light. The security cam at a parking lot on the corner captured the accident, and happened to be positioned to catch the lights hanging over the intersecting streets. Both lights were plainly green.

The TV station cut to a stand-up by their reporter, a chunky black woman with a Farrah Fawcett-like blonde wig. She was describing how this accident was only one of many in the city of East Gatriot due to malfunctioning traffic lights. The head of the city's traffic department was there to explain that they had no idea how this could have happened but they were going to fix the problem within the next day. The reporter threw it back to the station who them reported on a strange case of cell phones being connected to the wrong parties. Often with hilarious results.

T'Keisha, nibbling the last bit of meat off a chicken wing was fascinated by the erratic blinking of the traffic light during the first report.

"Girl, what's the matter with you?" her father barked from across the table. "You've barely touched your meal. You got a problem with your Mama's cooking?"

"No, the chicken's great. It's just this thing about the traffic lights."

"Ahhh, It's probably just crappy parts from China or someplace. None of this would happen if people bought stuff made in America."

"I know," T'Keisha answered without really listening to her father. He was always going on about parts made in China. He worked as a repairman at a local factory so the lack of good parts was always a part of his life. "It's just that the green light was blinking all during the newscast. Only green lights never blink, just the red or yellow lights. And it wasn't blinking at a steady rate. it was ill-regular but not exactly erratic, and it seemed like it was repeating itself...."

"What are you talking about? It's just a machine."

T'keisha nodded.

"Tragedy struck today," the TV was saying, "When a man calling his wife was connected to her lover instead. The enraged man drove across town and shot his rival before returning to his home where police arrested him trying to kill his wife."

"Sad, sad news," the perky anchor commented.

"What are the odds of that happening?" her co-host asked.

"What indeed?" T'keisha thought, cleaning up her plate before her father complained again. Tucker had warned her to be on the look-out for anything weird happening. Was this 'weird' enough?

"What a weird day at work," her father said as he savored his after-dinner cup of coffee. "We had machines turning themselves on or off, or going in reverse. We'd tear them apart and nothing was wrong. Crazy, crazy day."

Her father started asking her mother about her day while T'Keisha was helping clear the table. It seemed like a Sign, not that she believed in 'signs.' It wasn't just traffic lights and cellphones or ATM machines -- the news was reporting on some strange going on with them as well -- but when her father has strange things going on as well, that made it official. The TV station re-broadcast it's 5 O'clock news show at 5:30. This time she was going to tape that blinking stoplight and see if it really was blinking out some code.

***

"Hey Danny," It was Tucker on the phone, "Can you fly over real quick. Something's coming up I think you should know about."

"Tucker, it hurts too much to make the charge. I can be over there in 20 minutes on my scooter. Can it wait that long?"

"Yeah, man, I guess. But no sidetrips, this is pretty important."

Danny closed his phone and grabbed his pants out of the laundry. He give them a sniff, shuddered and threw them back in. Spaghetti stains on his Tee shirt sent it the same way. From his dresser he pulled an identical pair of jeans and tee shirt, pulled them on, stuffed his feet into tennies and raced downstairs. "Going to Tucker's" he announced as he grabbed his helmet from a peg by the door. If his parents had objections they were too slow making them as he raced down the steps and unlocked the storage shed under the steps. With a kick his mo-ped started and roared off into the night at a breath-taking 15 miles and hour!

Tucker was waiting for him at the door and lead him upstairs to his bedroom. There he was surprised to find a blurry web-cam'ed T'Keisha peering out of one of the monitors.

"Hi?" He said uncertainly. "Did you get your computer fixed?"

The girl shook her head. A rattle of beads in her cornrows rustled from a speaker. "I picked up this old computer for Salvation Army for twenty bucks. Had to replace the hard drive and one of the RAM sticks but it's working OK for now. I'm surprised my web cam works OK with it, but it's nice seeing you guys instead of just hearing you over the phone."

"T'Keisha thinks Technus is still around," Tucker butted in.

"What makes you think that," Danny asked. He had a sinking feeling she was right. As he had thought back to that night they'd first fought Technos 0.7 it seemed like two copies of the viral villain had been created but only one defeated.

T'Keisha was holding up a newspaper to the camera lens. "This, can you make it out?"

Danny squinted at the small, blurry image produced by the web cam. " 'ATM PLAYS PRACTICAL JOKE'," he read slowly.

"Right," T'Keisha dropped the newspaper and pushed her face in close to the web cam. "The article says that an ATM at a Second City National bank began printing out Chinese fortunes on receipts whenever anyone tried to withdraw money. It debited the money from their account but didn't dispense it. The bank hasn't been able to find out where the money was re-deposited."

"Boucou Bucks, I'll bet," Danny suggested.

"Who?" The name was unfamilar to T'Keisha. "But there's more. The fortunes would say things like 'Good Luck Is Best Seen in Hindsight' then print five lucky numbers and three, 3-letter words. Someone noticed that one string of numbers was today's winning Lotto number and I've been able to identify that most of the other numbers are winning Lotto numbers in some state somewhere."

"Wow, that is a cruel joke," Danny said.

Tucker nodded in agreement. "But that's not all. 'T' tell Danny the rest,"

T'Keisha flashed a smile when Tucker said her name and picked up the newspaper again. She opened it and folded over the pages so she could hold one section in front of the Web Cam. "Can you see this picture of one of the receipts?" she asked.

Danny squinted again and hesitantly read off "FDR", "SJP" and "USX." I don't get it. Wait, Isn't USX a company, US Steel or something. That's how its listed on the stock market. FDR's of course Roosevelt but SJP?"

"Sarah Jessica Parker," Tucker furnished.

"Ok, a president, an actress and a steel company. That doesn't make any sense at all."

"I thought so, too. Then I decided to Google combinations of the three words. Turns out FDR and SJP are also legitimate stock initials, too. So the ticket was giving out the names of three companies on the stock exchange."

"...and?"

"They all went up the day the ticket was printed. Not a lot but if anyone had invested in these three stocks that day they would have made some money."

"If they had known to invest in those stocks," Tucker explained.

"How did it know the stocks would go up?" Danny wondered.

"A whole lot of people at the FEC would like to know that," Sam said, causing Danny to start. She was coming in Tucker's bedroom door, a mo-ped helmet under her arm.

"Where'd you come from," he gasped.

"Tucker called me right after he hung up on you, said to come on up if he wasn't at the door. "What's this about an ATM machine that can predict the stock market?"

"Technus," Tucker said,

"Ah. Anything else Technus been doing?" Sam asked. "Hi, T'Keisha," she called when she noticed Tucker's friend on the monitor.

"There's been reports of malfunctioning traffic signals, caused a lot of accidents. Some were pretty serious."

"What makes you think Technus was behind those?" Sam asked. She dropped her helmet on Tucker's bed and pulled up the only chair in the room near the monitor.

"The green lights were blinking. I thought I saw a pattern."

"What kind of pattern?" Tucker asked, leaning over Sam's head.

"There was a pattern of six blinks followed by a paused and then repeated. Only they weren't random or consistent."

"?" Danny grunted in confusion.

"Well, first there were four quick blinks, a short pause followed by another short blink and then a longer blink. After another pause it would repeat.

"Sounds like Morse Code." Tucker suggested.

"That's what I thought, too, so I looked up the code. Four dots means 'H' while a dot and a dash is 'A'..."

"Ha?" Sam murmured quizzically.

"More like 'ha ha ha ha'," T'Keisha replied.

The traffic light was laughing?" Danny burst out.

"Kinda...maybe..." T'Keisha said, defensively.

"Man, that is Technus, for sure." Tucker came to T'Keisha's defense.

"Anything else?" Sam asked, pushing Tucker aside as he continued to loom over her.

"Did I mention the cell phones?"

"Not to me," Sam answered. "What happened?"

"A man tried to call his wife and got connected to her lover instead. He killed the guy and tried to kill his wife."

"Oh--" Sam replied sympathetically.

"I don't know if we can blame Technus for that," Danny said. "How would he know who the woman's boyfriend was?"

"Phone records," Tucker suggested. "All Technus would have to do was look up who the woman had been calling and connect her husband to the most frequent number called. Nine times out of ten it would be harmless, a mutual friend or some such. But if you did that often enough you're likely to hit a number than the wife--"

"--or husband --" Sam interjected.

"-- wouldn't want her husband to know about."

"T'keisha," Danny asked in the silence that followed that, "when did the traffic light incident happen? Was it in the morning, afternoon, or did it happen all day long?"

"I don't know." She looked through the newspaper hurriedly. "It says these happened early today. The cell phone outrage happened around noon and the ATM thing, ah -- towards quitting time. Why?"

"I was thinking -- this is Technus 0.7. I -- we've -- fought Technus 1.0 and 2.0, so I was thinking that maybe he had to learn how to do stuff."

"Like controlling traffic light switches?" T'Keisha wondered.

"Yeah?"

"But wouldn't ATM's come before the cell phones?" Tucker asked.

"Not necessarily," Sam objected. "What you said about looking up most-frequently-used numbers makes a lot of sense, and wouldn't be that hard to do. Screwing with ATMs would have to be a lot harder, security codes and such to prevent people from hacking in. And what happened to all the money? Someone set up an invisible account on the system That takes a bit of work."

"There's one other thing about these ATM receipts," T'Keisha spoke up. "At the very bottom of every one there's a string of letters. It's always the same seven letters but it doesn't make any sense on any language I've tried it on. 'Ubhqvav.' Does that mean anything to any of your guys.

"Let's see," Danny asked. The black girl fumbled on her desk for a moment, then picked up the newspaper picture of an ATM receipt and held it near the Web Cam. Center and on the last line before the cutter snicked the slip from the roll were those seven letters, centered, uncapitalized, and not marked off with any other special characters, parenthesis, brackets, or stars.

"Tuck and I have been brainstorming cipher ideas but we haven't hit on anything yet.

"There are so many ways to encrypt a message I don't know if we will ever break this," Tucker sighed.

Sam was still squinting at the letters displayed on the Web Cam. "Maybe not."

"You know what it means?" Danny gasped.

"Hardly but think about it. The receipt says good fortune is best seem in hindsight, then offers you're the winning Lotto number and three winning stocks but because you're not thinking about Lotto tickets or the stock market these tips just seem like gibberish. Once we figure out what 'ubhgvav' means it will be so obvious we'll be slapping ourselves on the forehead going 'D'oh!' "

Tucker put his head next to Danny's ear and whispered, "It's your call, D-Man, but we seem to have a loose ghost down there."

"D-Man?' Danny whispered back.

"Look, it you want to talk about this among yourselves, I can cut the Web Cam connection and you can text me when you're ready." T'Keisha offered.

Danny shook his head. "I'd feel like I was talking behind your back, even though it's your suggestion." He paused for a moment. "Tucker's right, there's a ghost loose back there that we're responsible for. We need to come down and get it. But I don't think we can do all that in the couple hours we'd have if we stole the Specter Speeder again. We'd need to be down there a couple days, I think, but I don't know how we'd convince our parents to let us go. We need a plan and I'm fresh out of ideas."

"Could we convince your parents to take a vacation in Chicago?" Tucker suggested. "We could hope the rail system and be down in East Gratiot in no time."

"Probably, but why would they take you and Sam along? And how would we get away from them after we were there."

"Vacations are the worst for getting away from parents," Sam said. "They seem to think it's family bonding time so they stick closer to you then when you're at home." Sam appeared to be speaking from personal experience.

"So what sorts of things do parents let their teen-age kids go to without supervision?" Danny wondered.

"Summer camp." Tucker answered.

"Been there, done that, killed the ghost," Sam quipped.

"Besides we'd need something that's set inside the city, like a music camp."

"I play the clarinet," T'Keisha offered.

"Danny can't play anything and Tucker has no rhythm."

"Hey!" both boys protested.

"What other kinds of classes could one find in Chicago?" Sam wondered. "Yachting?"

"Do either of us look like we could afford a sailboat?" Danny objected.

"You can rent them, but it doesn't sound like a god idea. Art appreciation? Do you two ever appreciate anything?"

"I appreciate a good pizza," Tucker declared.

"There is a computer club that meets monthly," T'Keisha offered.

"I like it, but we have computer clubs in Amity Park so I don't see Danny's parents letting him go to Chicago just for that."

Danny had wandered around Tucker's room while they were talking. He finally sat down on the edge of his bed and picked up a comic books lying in the nightstand. He flipped through it casually since it was an issue he had read already. He plopped it back down on the night stand, then happen to notice the ad on the back cover.

"Ah, guys. This might work." He picked the comic back up and waved the ad at them.

"ComicCon?" Tucker asked, confused.

"Yeah, a comics convention! Parents are always letting kids go to comics conventions."

"Out of town?" Tucker asked.

"That was held last month," Sam objected.

"But this is a really big convention, lots of guest stars. It's something that only happens in a big city, like Chicago, and is worth going to. And the date doesn't matter because none of our parents would know differently? All we have to do is make up some convincing looking flyers set for the upcoming weekend, and convince them to let us go."

"By ourselves? To Chicago?" Sam shook her head. "They'd never agree to that."

"What if we gave them a chaperone?"

Sam looked up, "Who?" she asked.

"Jazz! She'll drive us down, run interference for Mom and Dad. It'll work."

"Why would Jazz help us?" Tucker asked.

"One word. Miracle Mile."

"That's two, Danny," Sam objected.

"It will work, Jazz drives us down to the city. We check into the "convention hotel." She disappears for a weekend of shopping and we have all the time in the world to ride out to East Gratiot and hunt down this other Technus. How does that sound, T'Keisha?"

"I guess it will work," but she sounded uncertain. "I just don't like you lying to your parents even if it is to help me."

Danny and Tucker couldn't think of a reply to that. Sam didn't seem concerned one way or the other.

"Look, I'll get Jazz to help us. Tucker, you work on photoshopping that flier and Sam..."

"I'm not making sandwiches if that's what you think. Maybe I'd better help Tucker with the flier."

"Sandwiches?" Tucker wondered, "Why would you need to make sandwiches, aw, now you've made me hungry..."

***

It took Danny longer than he expected to convince Jazz to help them. She was still mad at him for scaring her when she was driving Sam and Tucker out to help him with Sid's Technus attack. Since she'd only just gotten her driving license she wasn't a confident driver yet and Danny's little joke had hit her a lot harder than similar jokes he'd played on her around the FentonWorks.

He had appealed to her desire to help him fight ghosts and gotten no where with that. He waved "The Miracle Mile" before her but for some reason she wasn't as interested in shopping as he'd hoped. Perhaps because there weren't as many unique stores there that didn't have outlets in places like Amity Park. He even offered to cough up spending money for me, knowing that he would have to hit up Sam and Tucker for part of the money.

In the end, and totally desperate, he mentioned that Sid would be there helping them. He had to prod Jazz's memory a bit for her to remember who Sid was, and then mentioned how he thought she was "hot." Jazz had laughed at that but a few minutes later brought their conversation back around to Sid. Realizing that he had hit upon something Jazz was interested in, Danny had to figure out how to make Sid more attractive; a challenge since he had no idea what his sister found attractive in boys. In the end he played up Sid's troubled past and his problem with authority. Jazz was always trying to help people (whether they wanted it or not) and the more troubled Sid seemed the more Jazz would want to help.

Of course now that he had bribed Jazz with promises of Sid he had to get Sid to come along, which, fortunately, wasn't so much of a problem.

Tucker and Sam had photoshopped the ad from the back of the comic book so that its date was now the coming weekend. They printed out a bunch of copies, mailing some to themselves so that it looked like they were getting flyers from the convention. They mailed some to T'Keisha so she could show them to her parents in case she needed an excuse to go into Chicago.

Danny's parents proved to be more difficult that he had thought. Suddenly 14 was 'just a child' and 16 year old Jazz was way too young to chaperone... So Jack Fenton volunteered to go along to provide adult supervision. That, of course, was the last thing they wanted. Danny had to change tack -- and fast. So suddenly the convention was going to be dull and boring and without a speck of anything to do with ghosts. Danny's father hadn't considered that a weekend at a comics convention meant a weekend without ghosts. There were some things he could put up with, like being without fudge or cheese pizza, but a weekend without ghosts... Suddenly Danny and Jazz were old enough to take care of themselves afterall.

Once they had the Fenton's approval, Sam and Tucker's parents were easy to convince. Hotel reservations were made. Danny choked when he saw how much the per night fees were. His parents let him charge it on the Corporate credit card but still he knew he would be doing extra chores for them for months to come. He might even *gasp* have to get a part-time job!

***

Danny, of course, had been keeping Abigail Farley-Symthe-Hyde updated on all this, as he was still asking her questions to check out. Sam, Tucker and he had been going over the papers Abigail had downloaded from the Guys in White's mainframe and occasionally something would come up that called for a deeper look. Danny hadn't told them how he had gotten Abigail to cooperate; he didn't think Sam would take it well.

***

The trip started off in high spirits. The kids were excited at the adventure ahead, and by the thought that they had pulled one over on their parents. By the time they reached Chicago and started inching through traffic they were barely speaking to each other. Even for four teen-agers a Chevette was a small car, and with the load of ghost fighting equipment they needed as well as their clothes they had suitcases not only piled up in the trunk of the hatchback but also on their knees and under their feet. It as with a sigh of relief that Jazz pulled into a slot in the hotel's garage, turned off the motor and slowly, painfully crawled out of the car. The others followed.

"Next time, let's spring for a van," Tucker suggested, pulling his sticky tee shirt away from his body.

"What next time?" Sam wondered. She was feeling every bit as soggy as Tucker but refused to do anything so uncouth as to pull on her clothes. Instead she leaned against the car door and did some stretches, hoping that when they started to walk she wouldn't appear as crippled as she felt.

Jazz lead the way into the hotel, pulling her suitcase on its wheels behind her. The others followed, loaded down with suitcases, various gym bags and briefcases filled with ghost fighting gadgets "borrowed" from FentonWorks.

The blast of cool air as they crossed the lobby doors felt bone-rattling arctic. They had barely come to the middle of the lobby when someone called to them from off to the left, a lounge area filled with chairs and couches.

Sid, tall and lanky, was standing up and heading their way. Jazz straightened up at the sight of him. Next to him, also rising was a girl in her teens, dressed all in black with candy pink, short-cropped hair. Glints of light reflected off a number of body piercing on her face. That was Altheria, another friend from Camp Sleepy Hollow, who had help fight the ghost there. She and Sam had become good friends. She had also taken a shine to Sid so either one of them could have invited her. "Yo," she called as she followed in Sid's footsteps.

T'keisha had all but leaped from her chair and was racing over to embrace Tucker, who for once was too exhausted to meet her half way. Danny had called Sid, of course, and arranged for him to meet them here. T'Keisha he had expected to meet them at the train station tomorrow in East Gratoit. He was surprised her father had let her come so far downtown by herself.

What Danny hadn't expected and dreaded seeing was the last member in that group to stand up, a pretty red-head dressed all in white. Abigail Farley-Smythe-Hyde of Falls Church, Virginia. "Hi!" she squealed before hurrying over to join the rest.

"What is she doing here?" Sam demanded coldly.

"I don't know," was all he could whisper.

Jazz looked down at Danny and asked, "who are all these people? Are they all staying with us?" She didn't sound happy.

"This is Sid, Sid Hanley. You remember I said he would be here." Danny emphasized the last heavily. "And this is T'Keisha. She's the one we've come to help. But I wasn't expecting her to meet us at the hotel...."

"I couldn't wait to see Tuck -- you guys -- again so I told Daddy there was a comics convention here, showed him the flyer you guys made and he let me come down by myself. But I have to be back by eight."

"So you won't be staying in the room with us?" Jazz asked. Danny was beginning to see that Jazz was more concerned about the size of the hotel bill she would be putting on the Fenton Corporate credit card than the number of people come to meet them.

"This is Altheria," Danny continued the introductions.

"I called her," Sam volunteered. "Altheria lives close to Chicago so I thought it would be fun to see her again."

"Are you staying or commuting?" Jazz asked tactlessly.

"It's only an hour through traffic..." Altheria began.

"I'll pay her share of the room," Sam cut in.

"OK, then," Jazz replied. "And that leaves..." she nodded in Abigail's direction.

"Abigail Farley-Smythe-Hyde. She was at camp. Her father's a Guy in White." Danny recited in a monotone, then cringed, waiting for the inevitable harangue.

"Pleased to meet you," Jazz said politely, "Aren't the Guys in White based on the East Coast? What brings you all the way out to Chicago?"

"The ghost, of course. Danny told me all about it," Abigail gushed. "A ghost as a computer virus, who knew? I just had to come see it?"

"Aren't you, like, grounded for life -- or something?" Sam growled.

"Oh, that. Well, technically, but the old man's not home this weekend. So I snuck out."

"How did you get here?" Danny asked, genuinely confused by that part.

"I remembered your--" she caught Danny's sudden glare and stopped. "I remembered that the old man had one of the Guys in White's Strato-cycles in the shed out back, so I borrowed it. I've got it cloaked in the parking lot."

"Won't he notice all the missing fuel the next time he uses it?" Danny asked.

"Nah, he never notices stuff like that."

"Won't your mom notice you missing?" Danny couldn't stop asking questions thought he could tell that Sam didn't want him even talking to Abigail.

"I asked her if I could stay with my Aunt Beulah for the weekend. She lives up in Silver Springs, Maryland. It's on the Metro so Mom wasn't concerned about me traveling by myself. I went out the front door, walked around the back, climbed into the Strato-Cycle and here I am.

"Here you are indeed." Sam muttered darkly.

Jazz pulled Danny aside and whispered, "Do you think it's wise involving the daughter of a Guys in White? What if she finds out you-know-what?"

"I didn't ask her here, Jazz. I don't want her here. But she's here. We're going to have to live with it."

"And what if she finds out?"

"She's not. Don't worry about it."

"Danny, I'm responsible for you. I have to worry about it."

"Jazz, you're sixteen. When have you been responsible -- for anything."

Jazz growled but couldn't think of an answer. "Let's check in before anything else bad happens," Danny suggested.

Jazz sighed. They were going to need larger rooms. She pulled her suitcase over to the desk. "Jasmine Fenton and party," she announced. "We have a reservation."

"Yes, M'am." the clerk typed in her name on his computer. "Party of four, two adjoining rooms. How are you planning to pay?" he inquired.

Jazz handed him her Fentonworks corporate credit card.

"Could I see some ID?" he asked.

"Oh sure," Jazz was used to people not taking the corporate credit card at face value. She handed over her FentonWords ID card.

He looked at the card, compared her picture on the card to her, nodded, then handed it back. "Could I see a driver's license," he asked.

"Oh, sure." Jazz pulled out her wallet and dug out the card.

The clerk started typing in her driver's license number, then he stopped and frowned.

"You're sixteen?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," Jazz said proudly.

"Are your parents with you?"

"No."

"Any other adults in your party?"

"No. Why, is there a problem?"

"I'll have to talk to the manager," the clerk said and walked around the wall behind him to the offices on the other side.

Jazz frowned and tapped her fingers nervously on the countertop.

The clerk was back after just a minute. "I'm sorry," he said, "Unless there is an adult in your party we can't rent rooms to you."

"What?" Jazz demanded. "It's the credit card, isn't it?"

"No, M'am. It's against the law."

"The law?"

"Yes, M'am. The manager was quite clear about it. We're not permitted to rent rooms to unattended minors."

"But, but," Jazz sputtered. "That is so unfair,"

She stalked back to the group.

Danny appeared to be a rather intense conversation with Sam.

"For the last time, Sam," Danny was saying, "I didn't invite her."

"There's something you're not telling me." Sam accused.

"Danny!" Jazz interrupted "We've got a problem."

"Now what?"

"They won't let us have any rooms. Because we're minors. You've got to do something."

"What?"

"You know what." Jazz was refering to Danny's ghost power to 'over-shadow' and get them to say and do what he wanted.

"Oh." He paused "I can't. I told you I got blasted a couple days ago. It hurts like heck to change. I don't want to do it unless I have to."

"They're not going to give us any rooms unless you can convince them to, to overshadow them. I think this is important enough to do that."

"But..."

"Or we could go back home and tell mom and dad we lied to them."

"Maybe we can figure something out."

"I don't think T'Keisha's parents are going to take us in. You got any other ideas?"

"Hey, dudes, what's go on?" Sid ambled over to where Danny and Jazz were talking.

"They won't let us have rooms because there's no adults in our party."

"No problemo. I've got my fake ID right here." He held up a small plastic card.

"Nice," Altheria snatched it out of his hand and held it up to the light. "Mike Watowski? Guess we can tell what's your favorite movie." She handed it back to him. "I admire the workmanship. Do it yourself?"

"Nah, I paid a guy fifty bucks for it."

"It'd pass scrutiny in a dingy tavern where the bartender doesn't really care but here -- 'Mike' -- under good light it won't do at all."

"Thanks for the offer, Sid," Jazz said, touching his sleeve.

His face lit up. "Glad to help."

Jazz waited until they had wandered out of earshot. "Danny, see? You're our only hope."

"Ok. Where's the restrooms around here. I'll change and give you a sign when I'm ready to do this."

Jazz found herself surrounded by the others as Danny left. Sid had told the others what the problem was. They waited for Danny to return. Off in the distance was a cry of pain and moments later a cool wind blew pass Jazz's ear and a ghostly voice whispered, "let's do this."

Jazz went back to the desk. The clerk she had talked to early came over. "Something we can do for you, Miss? He asked. He stiffened for a moment then winked at Jazz. A really big, cartoon like wink. Jazz rolled her eyes. "We'd like to check in," she said, handing over her credit card.

The clerk looked at the computer in front of him as well as the various other gizmos there.

"What's the problem?" Jazz asked.

"I don't know how to do any of this."

"Just let the clerk do it."

"But -- Ok."

The clerk froze for an instant, then shook his head and asked,"How can I help you?"

"We were checking in," Jazz prompted.

"Of course, Miss Fenton. Could I see the adult in your party?"

Inwardly Jazz cursed. She had thought Danny could leave some post-hypnotic-like command to check them in. Instead the clerk remembered they were all minors.

"Get Sid," a cool breeze whispered.

Sid ambled over at her gesture. "This is our chaperone," she explained.

"Dude."

"You're the chaperone for the Fenton party?" the clerk was dubious.

"That's right, man."

"Could I see some ID?"

Sid brought out his fake ID and handed it over. The clerk frozen briefly while taking it, winked ludicrously at Jazz and said, "Fine. Thank you, Mr. Watowski." The clerk twitched again.

"Were you still using the FentonWorks credit card or Mr. Watowski's?" the clerk asked. Jazz hand over her corporate card and watched as the clerk slide it through a gizmo, typing in obscure numbers. Then typed in stuff on his computer before typing in some other numbers on a third machine than popped out door pass cards. She realized just what a problem Danny had faced when overshadowing the clerk. There was a lot more to running a hotel then they had thought. Fortunately Danny only had to overshadow the clerk long enough to accept Sid as an adult. Once the clerk had heard himself call Sid an adult it was fixed in his mind that there was an adult in the party, irrespective of how youthful Sid actually looked.

Soon Jazz had their room assignment and four entry cards. She herded the group into an elevator up to their room. The two adjoining rooms were kind of interesting. There was only one door from the hall, it opened into a six by six vestibule from which two doors opened into separate rooms. Jazz sent the boys off to the left room while the girls to the one on the right. Each room had two king-size beds. Jazz took the bed nearest the window while Sam and Altheria quickly dumped their things on the other bed, leaving Abigail looking unsure where she was sleeping. T'keisha, unaware of the undercurrents in the room, went to the window and threw open the curtains.

Their room have a great view of a vast expanse of roof, with assorted air conditioner units, vents and access doors. Somewhere off in the distance was Lake Michigan.

"For what they're charging I would have expected a better view,"Jazz said as she joined the black girl at the window.

"It is next to the convention center." Sam joined them.

"Which we're not using because there's no comics convention there."

"It was part of our cover."

"Maybe we should have just told Mom about this ghost thing. This is starting to run into a lot of money. FentonWorks may have the market on ghost detection and eradication but it doesn't bring in that much money and Dad, of course, is always spending it."

"On new technology," Danny said, coming into the room. "You gotta spend money to make money he always says. Swell digs, huh?"

"For what it's costing it'd better be."

"So what's our plan?" Abigail asked. She was hanging up a number of shirts in the room's closet, all full sleeved. Under her shirt her body was a maze of pinkish, healing scars.

"In the morning I figured we'd take the train out to T'Keisha's, split up into teams and criss-cross the city looking for the ghost. There haven't been any further signs of activity, has there?" Danny asked.

T'Keisha shook her head.

"When are we going to eat?" Tucker asked as he followed Danny into the girl's room. "I'm starving."

"There's always Room Service," Altheria suggested. She found a menu on the corner desk and started reading it out loud. "Surf and Turf. $34.95! What do they do, butch the cow personally?"

"No Room Service!" Jazz said. "No!"

"Touchy," Altheria muttered. "Here's a hamburger with fries, pickle spear and coleslaw. Sound delicious. $15.76? My god, this is like highway robbery."

"I'm sure there's a restaurant downstairs." Jazz suggested.

"In this hotel? I think it would make room service sound cheap," Sam said. "There's a coffeshop here, though."

"Good." Jazz said. "That sounds cheap."

"Right, if an eight dollar hamburger sounds cheap." Sam replied.

"Why didn't we think to pack some food?" Tucker mourned.

"It's OK, Tuck," Danny said. "I think I can afford to split an order of fries with you."

They kids got up and headed towards the door, except for Jazz who was still looking out the window.

"You coming?" Danny asked.

"It's OK. The hotel has a spa and I thought I'd have a long soak in their hot tub."

"Sounds cool," Sid said, "Mind if I join you?"

"Did you bring a swim suit?" Altheria asked tartly.

"Oh, uh."

"I'm sure the gift shop has some bathing suits," Jazz replied.

Altheria grumbled, then said, "fine," before joining the others in the hallway.

As they rode the elevator down Sam nudged Danny and asked, "What's going on with Sid and Jazz?"

"I -- uh -- may have mentioned that -- uh -- Sid -- uh --"

" 'Uh' -- what, Danny?"

"Imighthavesaid Sidhadathingforher," Danny blurted out in a single breath.

"You threw Sid at Jazz just to get her to drive us here!" Sam exclaimed.

"Thanks, jerk," Altheria slapping Danny on the shoulder, hard.

"Danny, that's despicable," Sam added.

"She wasn't going to help us otherwise. I had no choice. Besides it won't last."

"How do you know?" Altheria demanded.

"Because she's always going out with jocks and they never last more than a couple weeks," Danny explained Altheria didn't look mollified. "Oh, please don't tell me you two were dating."

"Well, not officially." Altheria confided. "I just kind of like him and he seemed to like me despite everything and..."

"Oh, great! I've screwed up again. I can't do anything right." Danny whined.

"It's OK. It's probably better to learn about it now than later." Altheria didn't sound sincere as she said that.

Danny found himself walking alone from the elevator when they reached the ground floor. And had no appetite for the hamburger he ordered.

T'keisha left after the meal, having to catch the train home before her father's curfew. She would met them at the train station in the morning. Jazz and Sid eventually returned from the spa, wrapped in towels, Laughing cheerfully. Altheria suddenly discovered she needed to go to sleep, kicking Sid out of the girl's room to do so. The boys watched TV for a while but the hotel's selection was heavily into business and political channels. They, too, decided to turn in. Tucker was soon snoring softly from his side of the big bed but Danny couldn't sleep. Altheria was mad at him, and Sam was, too. So again he had screwed up. He meant well but always it seemed he screwed thing up. Silently he cursed the day he had ever stepped into the tunnel of his parents ghost portal and had been changed into Danny Phantom.

***

Morning came inevitably. Jazz was off to go shopping, Sid trailing along like a puppy on a leash. The others filled backpacks with Fenton Finders, Spectrocorders, assorted weapons, bottled water and bagels filched from the Continental breakfast the hotel provided. Altheria had applied more rings and pins to her face than Danny had ever seen before, lined her eyes with so much mascara she looked like a raccoon and had washed the pink out of her hair and replaced it with what smelled and looked like grape kool-aid. Abigail was dressed all in white, of course and was rubbing sun-block into her face and wrists when Danny knocked on their door and entered. Sam came out of the bath room just then, giving Danny a bit of a jolt.

She was wearing a forest green undershirt, sleeveless and with a large scoop in the front. Over it was a brown mesh vest that matched the brown suede pants she wore. A woven belt run through her pant loops looking a bit like ivy leaves. Danny wanted to say how stunning she looked but the words stuck in his mouth.

Altheria looked up from what she was doing and said, "great outfit."

And then it was too late.

To say anything now would just make Danny sound like a suck-up.

***

The doorman gave them directions to the train station. It was a bit of a hike away, but they were young and excited. Altheria took to being the tour guide, pointing out various highlights as they passed, or as was more often the case, became visible in the distance. They picked up a couple maps of the region at the station and studied them on the long journey out to East Gratiot.

It was a sign of how low Danny was feeling that T'Keisha's happy grin when they -- or rather Tucker -- stepped out of the train actually made him feel better. The train station was only several blocks from T'Keisha's house. She lead them to the play ground where only a few nights before they had hide the Specter Speeder when fighting Technus 0.7's first appearance. On a picnic table there they spread out a map and T'Keisha pointed out the various places where the ghost had manifested itself. There seemed to be no apparent pattern to the ghost's movement.

Danny suggested they split into groups and head off in different directions from the park, it being as close to the center of Technus' activities as any place. They would call the others on their cell phones if they got any positive response on the Fenton Finders.

"Ok," T'Keisha agreed. " Tucker and I will go south, towards those ATM machines...."

"Wait," Altheria objected. "I don't know how to say this, but, ah, maybe T'Keisha and Tuck ought to be part of two separate groups."

"Aww," Tucker complained.

"It's like this, Snowball and I," Altheria jerked her thumb toward's Abigail, "kind of stick out. No offense intended but a couple of white girls running around here are going to stick out."

"But if I were with you, it would be OK?" T'keisha asked.

"I can take care of myself," Abigail objected.

"Because I'm black?" T'keisha said. She didn't sound happy.

"Yes. No. This isn't coming out right."

"Your saying you don't feel safe here because you're white?" T'Keisha accused.

"I'm saying...."

"I think she has a point," Danny injected. "No offense, but a bunch of white kids running around here would stand out. But if they've in the company of you or Tucker people won't think anything of it."

"Nothing would happen to you here. This is a nice place," T'Keisha insisted.

"Yeah, but let's not take any chances."

"Fine, I'll take her." T'Keisha pointed to Abigail.

"OK, I'll take Sam," Tucker said.

"Why don't you take Altheria, instead," Sam suggested. "In case Danny has to..." She didn't say what but Tucker nodded and said "Oh, yeah."

"We'll call every hour on the hour if we don't find anything. Call immediately if something turns up." Danny directed as they got up and left the park.

***

Danny and Sam were walking west towards a business district. Danny had the Fenton Finder out. He was going through a number of settings. The display continued to show a flat field, absent any ectoplasm.

"Here's the intersection where the lights went crazy," Sam told him. They stop and scanned the intersection first with the Finder and then with the Spectrascope. The latter picked up some residual ectoplasm but it was so weak and diffuse that they could learn nothing from it.

"Let's try a couple blocks over," Sam suggested, "that's where another traffic light acted up."

But even there the specter traces were too faint to tell them anything.

Sam was trying to find where another traffic light incident has occurred when their cell phone rang. Tucker and Altheria were reporting in. They hadn't found anything yet. Tucker had barely rung off when T'Keisha and Abigail called, also to report nothing. With a sigh Danny closed his phone and dropped in his pocket. Sam had located another traffic light incident and they trudged off.

"I probably could cover a lot more ground as Danny Phantom," he suggested.

"Go ahead. This walking around is boring."

Danny didn't do anything.

"Aren't you going to go ghost?" When Danny still didn't say anything Sam asked, "Is that burn still hurting that much?"

"Yeah."

"Have you tried staying Danny Phantom so it might heal?"

"I haven't had a chance. People keep expecting me to be me. And even if I did have a couple hours when I could be Danny Phantom...it just hurts too much making the change. This sucks."

"Does it look like it's getting any better?"

"The times I've had to go ghost haven't been exactly time when I could take a leisurely gander at old wounds."

"All the more reason for you to change now before any emergency so we can take a look at it. If we do find Techus 0.7 today you're going to need to change, so do it now so we can do this other thing."

"You're starting to nag like my mother."

"It only sounds like nagging because I'm right."

Before Danny could think of a good answer his cell beeped. "Yo, Danster," Altheria boomed, "We're found Technus! We're at -- uh -- 146th and Richard Daley. What now?"

"We'll be right there," Danny replied. "Keep him in sight but don't try to provoke him. He can be pretty dangerous."

"Saved by the bell," Sam quipped.

"Hardly. Now I've got to chance for sure. I'll -- go behind that dumpster. Warn me if anyone comes around."

"The streets been empty all day," Sam said rolling her eyes. "Go ahead, knock yourself out."

There was a brief flicker of light as Danny went ghost, and a very loud cry but moments later invisible hands picked Sam off the street and whisked her towards where Altheria and Tucker were.

Danny dropped Sam off a block away then spend on to find Technus.

He wasn't hard to miss, floating above a small shopping center, causing the electric lines to whip through the air like sparking snakes, and laughing crazily.

Seeing Technus, Danny just lost it. All the angry, the self-criticism, doubts boiled up inside. Danny speed full-tilt towards Technus, crashing into him with hammering force. Technus crashed to the parking lot with a thud that left a dent in the asphalt. Danny turned and hurled towards the ghost. He raised a ball of green ectoplasm in his hand and flung it on ahead of himself. It caught Technus in the face as he was just getting off the ground. Then Danny plowed into him, knocking Technus across the small lot into a beat-up Bruick parked on the street.

The car fell into pieces as the ghost climbed out of it. A bumper levitated into the air and hurled towards Danny. He easily dodged and laced more fireballs of ectoplasm towards the ghost. Technus snarled and sent the electric lines whipping Danny's way but bolts of ectoplasm cut them down before they got in his way. With a curse the ghost sprinted into one of the stores in the shopping center.

Danny followed in pursuit, phasing through the storefront as it it weren't there. The room was dim, obscure following the bright afternoon light outside. He couldn't see Technus anywhere.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Danny blanched. The store Technus has run into was an appliance center. He was floating in a room filled with hundred of technological devices, any one of them a weapon at the hands of Technus, Master of all things Technical!

Slowly Danny drifted down the aisles looking for his enemy. At any minute he expected a washer to launch itself at him, or for some fancy hi-end headphones to leap off the wall and try to strangle him with their long cables. Where could Technus have hidden, Danny wondered.

"Looking for me?" a chorus of voices suddenly queried on his left. Danny spun and gasped as he saw fully a half-dozen Technus 0.7's rising above a counter filled with computers.

"You're good, child. Very good, but Technus 0.7 is better, smarter, faster," the cloned ghosts were saying in eerie unison. As Danny watched in horror, more ghosts were oozing out of the computers.

Danny realized, with a terrible chill running down his spine, that if those computers were connected to the internet Technus would be able to spread throughout the world. That, he had to prevent, above all else. With a scream Danny launched himself towards the flock of Technuses. A monitor rose to smash into him. Keyboards slapped at him like awkward bats. Mouses darted about him like mosquitos. Danny was painfully driven back. But not before one burst of ecto-plasmic fire burst a computer. The Technus emerging from the computer wailed as it de-rezed and vanished.

Danny made another charge and again was driven back. The room was beginning to become crowded with Technuses. Some were starting to drift out of the building to look for more technology to harness to their will -- whatever that goal was.

Sam had found Tucker and Altheria. The three of them were waiting across the street from the shopping center for some direction from Danny. T'Keisha and Abigail were hurrying to join them. When the first of the Technuses emerged from the building Tucker nailed it with a shot from a heavy-gauge Fenton Blaster. It popped like a balloon, as much to their surprise as its. The other Technuses turned towards Tucker and slowly began to advance. Tucker fired again but this time the Technus it hit didn't explode, disappear or drop from the sky. It was bowled over and driven against the side of the building but after a moment picked itself up and resumed advancing towards the four teen-agers.

"What the heck happened inside?" Altheria cried. She had fumbled out a Fenton blaster and was trying to hit a ghost with its beam of supernatural energy.

"Where's Danny?" Sam asked.

A burst of shots from the side caused four Technuses to implode. T'Keisha and Abigail had arrived.

Abigail was using something that looked like a giant .45 automatic, something she have swiped from her father office before coming to Chicago. It was more powerful than the blaster that Tucker was using but the way a spent cartridge was ejected each time she shot it, the gun wouldn't be useful for very long, its limited supply of bullets spent.

"I thought Danny said there was only one ghost here?" She demanded petulantly.

"Didn't he mention that it cloned itself from an email?" Sam snarled back.

"Not like this he didn't."

"You should have stayed in DC, where you belong!"

"And miss out on this?" Abigail popped a clip out of the butt of her gun and slammed a fresh clip in. "No way!"

"Idiot." Sam muttered.

She was going to say more but suddenly heard a faint keening sound rifling through the air. A sound she'd heard before. "Cover your ears!" Sam shouted.

"What?" Abigail began but then the thin keening turned into a deep throated wailing, a roaring like a million tornados. The front of the appliance store exploded out, smashed into a million splinters. Abigail was thrown to the ground and covered with debris. When the horrendous wailing ceased she slowly pulled herself out from under the rubble. She wiped her hand across her face and stared in anger at the globs of red blood she found there. "Not again," she cried petulantly.

Sam was also climbing to her feet. She grabbed Tucker's heavy blaster and started running towards the store.

"What are you doing?" Altheria called.

"Danny's in there."

"Are you crazy?" Altheria demanded from Sam's side. "There must be a million copies of Technus in there."

"He needs our help."

"The frigging building just exploded. I don't think anyone can help him now."

Sam paused at the front of the building. "You don't have to be here," she told Altheria.

"Come on, we're best buds. I'll go anyplace you do. I just don't know why you think this is such a good idea."

"The ghostly wail completely drains Danny. he won't be able to protect himself from the Technuses."

"Oh, Danny Phantom! I thought you meant the Fenton kid." The smoke was beginning to clear out. Sam cautiously stepped over the rubble into the building.

"You know, one of those two ought to change their name," Altheria was saying as she followed Sam into the building, "so people won't keep confusing the two."

"Yeah, right," Sam absent-mindedly replied. "Look for white hair and glowing eyes. The black suit of his doesn't help much right now."

"What are the odds of two people having the same first name like that?" Altheria wondered. The Technuses were spilling out of the building, there being no appliances left for them to use.

"Just look for Danny," Sam snapped.

But a moment later invisible hands grabbed both Sam and Altheria and flew them out of the building and across the street to where Tucker, Abigail and T'Keisha were waiting.

"Danny," Sam was calling, "Are you all right?"

"You don't want to know," the invisible voice answered, fading away even as he spoke. Moments later Danny became visible behind the ranks of Technuses, unloading as wall of fire on them.

The wall was weak, the Technuses numbered so many that it barely affected them.

Danny tried another maneuver, blasting the top off a fire hydrant and directing the fountaining water into the mass of ghosts. But the ghosts had evolved beyond where water could affect them.

The crowd of Technuses became disassembling the cars parked along the street, sending the parts hurtling at Danny. As he dodged them he took small comfort in the fact that they hadn't gotten the idea yet to reassemble the car into a giant robot. The other Technus, the real Technus had, and those spectral robots had been hard to defeat. Perhaps another Ghostly Wail? But already he knew that he didn't have the energy within him for that.

Think! Think! There had to be some way to defeat even these dozens of Technuses...

Was it time to call in the big-guns, the pros? His Dad and Mom could there in under an hour with the Specter Speeder, the Guys in White would be rather longer since they had farther to travel. But could even they be enough? Sam and Abigail was already using the best of their weapons. And even if every Guys in White showed up they were still be out-numbered twenty to one.

Even as Danny circled the cloud of Technii picking off stragglers with concentrated ectoplasm fire the answer was coming to him. It was wild. It was crazy. It was breath-takingly audacious. And the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like the only answer. Fight fire with fire. Fight Technus with...

Danny swooped down next to Sam. "I've got an idea," he told her. "But I'm going to need some help."

"Sure what do you want me to do?"

"I want you to organize a safe withdrawal. It's going to take me a couple hours to get what I need, so you've got to keep the Technuses engages so they won't think about infecting another computer and spread across the Internet, but don't get them so worked up that they actually attack you."

"I thought you said you needed help?"

"I do. But I'm going to take--" Danny looked around the small group. Abigail and Altheria were standing shoulder to shoulder, watching each other's back at they carefully picked off Technuses who wandered too close. Tucker was standing next to T'Keisha globbing ectoplasm from a Fenton bazooka. T'Keisha -- T'Keisha held a blaster in a shakey hand. From time to time she'd push the trigger but because her hand was shaking so much she had yet to hit anything.

"--I'm going to take -- that girl!" He pointed at T'Keisha.


	7. Chapter 7

Viral Attach -7- Smash and Grab

"Put me down!"

"T'Keisa!"

"Put me down!"

"T'Keisa!"

"Put me down!"

"T'Keisa! Will you listen to me," Danny Phantom shouted at the slender black girl struggling in his arms. "I can't put you down, we're too high in the air!"

He rolled over a bit so that she could see over his shoulder. The ground was a blur of lines and squares -- streets, city blocks, sickenly far away. The girl's flailing arms suddenly clamped tightly about him while she tried to bury her face into his neck.

"What are you doing?" she gasped into his ear.

"I need your help."

"Couldn't you find someone who wasn't afraid of heights."

"As long as you touch me you can't fall. You don't have to hold on so tight. It's a little -- hard to breathe."

After a moment when her arms still constricted like a python Danny asked, "T"Keisha, can you hear me?"

"U-huh." she squeaked faintly.

"I will not let you fall. You're safe here."

"U-huh." She did not sound at all convinced.

"We're going to get help."

"U-huh."

"And I need your help getting it. Ok?"

"U-huh."

"Are you going to relax?"

"Uh-uh."

Great, Danny thought.

He was heading east out of the greater Chicago area. Behind, he had left Sam and Tucker and their friends Altheria, and Abigail fighting a clone army of Technus 0.7's. The computer virus generated ghost had invaded an appliance store after rampaging through T'Keisha's home town of East Gratiot. Inside it had infected first one, then all the computers on display, and from each infected computer dozens of new viruses had emerged. It was just luck that none of the display computer had been connected to the Internet, or Technus 0.7 might have begun infected the entire world. As it was the constantly generating new ghosts was overwhelming Danny's own ghost powers and the many weapons of his four (five counting T'Keisha) friends. They had to try a different tack and Danny thought he had the answer. But to get it he would have to enter the Ghost Zone, which meant a trip back to his parent's lab and the Ghost Zone Portal. But what he planned to do would take two people and of all the people fighting ghosts right now, T'Keisha was the only one they could spare.

He flew in silence for a while, wondering what his sister, Jazz, would do in a situation like this. Jazz was the cool collected one, the girl who was going be a psychologist when she grew up. This seemed like exactly the sort of thing psychologists dealt with. He wished he could pull out his cell phone and call her but he couldn't get to it while T'Keisha was holding on so tight and Jazz would not like to be interrupted while shopping. He was already on pretty thin ice with her with his clever little expedition to Chicago spinning wildly out of control. He didn't want to press his luck with in case she decided to pull the plug on the whole scam.

"T'keisha?" he asked after a while.

She voice came faintly to his ear, "huh?"

"You still with me?"

"I guess."

"Good. Here's what we're doing. We're going to Amity Park. When we get to we're going to Danny's parent's lab, the FentonWorks. Inside the lab is a portal to the Ghost Zone."

"Uh-huh."

"We're going to borrow their Specter Speeder and go into the Ghost Zone. You'll be safe inside the Speeder because it has ghost deflector technology built into its hull."

"Do we have to?" she plaintively asked.

"The only thing that can stop the Technus-clones is in the Ghost Zone. We have to get it. It's the only way to help Tucker. You understand?"

"I don't want to go there."

"T'Keisha, you can do this. Tucker and Sam have been in the Ghost Zones lots of times. Nothing can harm you there while you stay in the Specter Speeder. I need you to pilot the speeder while I go collect what we need."

"But I don't know how to fly a plane."

"It's not a plane."

"But..."

"T'keisha, we've all learned how to fly the speeder. None of us have ever had any formal training. The speeder is easy to flight. You can do this. I know you can."

"Is that why you pick me?"

"mmm" Danny hesitated answering.

"Oh," she sighed.

"It not like that. Well maybe it is. Look, T'keisha, you weren't doing much good back there. Sam and Tucker know how to fly the Speeder, but they're also familiar with fighting ghosts so it was best to leave them back there in charge. Abigail and Altheria don't know any more about flying the speeder but they were doing pretty good at knocking down Technus. So, yeah, that left you, but this will be different. Ghosts won't be flying at you. You'll be inside the Speeder, protected by the Speeder. You can do this."

"Don't make me do this." she asked.

"You'll be fine," he said but somehow that didn't seem to comfort the girl at all.

***

After what seemed like an eternity, Amity park hoved into view. He stopped following the freeway he'd used to guide him out of Chicago, and aimed directly for FentonWorks. The crazy old brownstone with what looked like a flying saucer beached on its roof soon came into view and without slowing down Danny went immaterial passed through its brick walls, wood floors and inactive ghost alarms into the basement laboratory.

"You can open your eyes," he told T'Keisha when they had come to a rest on the cement floor. She gasped a little as she looked around at all the strange devices and gizmos piled up on shelves and benches there. The place was bizarre, eerie and, oddly, intriguing. She was about to step towards something that looked like a vacuum cleaner built into a microwave oven when Danny touched her arm and pulled her towards a large, shiny van sitting on steel rails that lead towards closed double doors. He tapped in the password Sam had has figured out, opening the door. T'Keisha was pulled in and pushed down into a pilot's seat in the front. The ghost boy took the other seat in front of the large windshield.

He started pushing a number of button on his set of controls. The board in front of T'Keisha lit up, a faint rumbling from the back of the vehicle indicated that a generator had started.

"Once we get into the Ghost Zone," Danny said, "I'll show you how to fly the Speeder."

Without meaning to, T'Keisha cringed from his voice. It echoed in a weird and sinister manner. it made her think of the grave which on an rational level she knew was ridiculous because she had no idea what a grave would sound like. But on the animal level, deep at the base of her brain, she knew exactly what that was.

The Speeder started turning on its stand and came to rest facing the far wall of the lab. There was a large octagonal frame built into the wall with heavy steel shutters covering it. Out of the corner of her eye (because it almost made her sick to look at him) Danny Phantom flicked up a plastic cover on a button situated on the top right corner of the panel. She saw there was one on her set of controls. When he pushed this button the shutters on the big opening began to crank open.

Beyond was a swirling void, bluish like the color of Danny Phantom's ectoplasm blasts or maybe not colored at all. Or maybe a color she had never seen before. The void, T'Keisha decided, was like nothing on Earth. "So this is the Ghost Zone" one part of her brain wondered, interested in spite of herself. T'Keisha liked science. She liked understanding things, knowing how stuff works. The Unknown called to her, even as it scared the bejeebus out of her.

"Here we go," the creepy voice of Danny Phantom announced. The Speeder lifted a few inches, then with no sense of movement, slide across the room and into the void. T'Keisha braced herself for impact but when she opened an eye a moment later to peek, they were already through the portal into a vast, endless expansive, swirling the same non-color as before. Dotting through the void were endless numbers of doors. Wooden, with frame and brass doorknobs, looking for all the world like they're ready to be opened.

The speeder picked up speed and quickly left the realm of Doors behind.

In the distant small islands began appearing, floating in the void like seaweed in a lake.

"OK," said the graveyard voice, "We've got a few minutes to go over the operation of the Speeder." T'Keisha turned towards the voice by reflex, saw Danny's glowing green eyes and turned away shuddering.

She must have heard him sigh in exasperation.

"I'm sorry," she complained. "I can't look at you, you scare me."

"I'm the one ghost in the world who will not hurt you. I'm here to protect you."

She shook her head.

"What?" Danny asked.

"I try to tell myself that but it doesn't work. Something about the way you look scares me."

"I need your help. I really need your help. Tucker needs your help. I think the whole world needs you to overcome that this one time."

T'Keisha just kept shaking her head.

"Does it creep you out to hear me?" Danny asked,

T'Keisha nodded, her eyes still tightly closed and buried in her shoulder.

"But not as much as see me?"

"Yeah." she said faintly.

"OK. Let's work with that. I'm going to step back. I want to you to open your eyes and look at the control panel."

The girl straightened up slightly. Her shoulders were still hunched like she still feared something was going to leap on her.

"Tp your right is a handle. Put your hand on it. That's the throttle. Push it forward a little bit." The speeder leaped forward with a lurch when she moved the handle. Danny had her move the throttle back, then forward again until she seemed confident using it. Next he had her place her hands on the wheel and practice that control. Pushing forward caused the Speeder to descend, pulling up to ascend. Turning the wheel right or left took them in that direction. He put her through a few maneuvers until she felt confident that she could put the Speeder where she wanted it. Danny pointed out a few other controls on the console: lights, the spectral deflector controls, how to open and close the side door, and the beacon that linked them to the Fenton's Ghost Zone Portal. Finally he stuck his hand out to point to a region slightly to the right and below central. T'Keisha flinched at the sight of his arm but changed directions to where he wanted.

Danny muttered "sorry," and fell into one of the back seats and closed his eyes. "Let me know when you see a largish island ahead with what looks like a castle on it. It shouldn't be more than ten or fifteen minutes. I'm going to rest back here, out of your way. Things are going to get pretty hectic when we get to Walker's Prison."

They flew in silence for a few minutes. Danny was nearly asleep. Using the Ghostly Wail took a lot out of him. Often it left him unconscious or reverted to human form at the end. Of course in his ghost form he recovered quickly but not that quickly. And flying back to Amity park with T'Keisha right after using it earlier had kept him from recovering fully.

"You must really hate me," T'Keisha unexpectedly said.

"What?" Danny asked as his brain worked overtime to catch up. "No, No? Why do you say that? I'd never say a thing like that."

"Well, all your friends are so great at this. They're brave, resourceful, fearless. They knew what to do without being told. And I -- I was just a -- a wuzz."

"That has nothing to do with it," Danny protested.

"It has everything to do with it."

"Sam and Tucker were friends of mi -- were friends of Danny Fenton's long before I came along. They're my friends because they are his friend. I want to call you my friend, too, because you're Tucker's friend. Besides they've just had a lot of experience already on fighting ghosts. This is your first time."

"How can I be your friend when I can't even stand looking at you?"

"You've got a lot of good attributes, T'Keisha. You're smart, clever. You can be very funny. You're the best thing that ever happened to Tucker. You're like the first girl who was able to look past his geeky exterior and see what a great guy he is inside."

"He is geeky. That's for sure."

"I'd do anything to see him happy."

"Like putting up with me?"

"No, by accepting that you are what you are." Danny sighed. "Look what all you've done so far. You handled an attack by Technus as well as anyone, then knew who to call for help. You saw the pattern of attacks later and called us down here. You figured out that those ATM slips were printing winning lottery numbers and stock market tips. If it weren't for you we'd be sitting around happy as frogs in a pond until Technus had taken over the world. Your smarts has been a big help. You're just not a frontline person. Don't get down on yourself, that's my job."

"I'd feel better if I were a frontline person."

"You're going to get your chance in just a few minutes," said Danny as he caught a glimpse of something in the distance. "Take us down a little bit. Walker has troopers circling the upper part of his island but for some reason not the lower part."

"What are we going to do?" she asked as Danny moved up to the co-pilot's seat. He made some adjustments to the controls there.

"We are going to fight fire with fire?"

"This is a prison for ghosts? There are laws that even ghosts can't break?"

"No, but there is a ghost who thinks he's the warden of all the Ghost Zone. He's always locking up ghosts here who, he thinks, has broken some law. But for there to be any laws there has to be a government right, elementary civics. There's no government in the ghost zone, therefore no laws, so Walker doesn't have any authority to run a prison. But there's no one to say he can't, either. As it happens Walker has the one ghost who could possibly defeat all those Technus 0.7s we left behind on Earth."

"Who? Ghost Superman?"

"Better. How do you fix a buggy program?"

"Generally I hack into it until I find the problem and re-write the code."

"You would. OK, when I have a buggy program, because I don't know anything about programming, I look for an update. Because a newer version of a program will always override an older version."

"There's a Technus in this prison?"

"Technus 2.0 he calls himself. I think that will trump any number of 0.7s."

"But won't he try to take over the world, too?"

"He's tried -- several times. But I've beat him every time. I think I can do it again if I have to."

"We're getting close to this prison thing of your," T'Keisha warned.

"OK. Here's the plan....."

***

Danny found some rope in a cabinet and tied one end to a back seat and the other around his waist. He cycled the side door open and leaned out. He watched as T'Keisha aimed the Speeder straight for the massive gate at the front of Walker's prison. He waited for the right moment.

"We're getting close," T'Keisha called nervously.

"Not yet," Danny answered. He waited, nervous, too, but not wanting to add to T'Keisha's alarm. Was he ready for this. Would Walker react the way he calculated he would.

"How much sooner?" T'Keisha asked again.

"Not yet."

"Don't wait too long."

"Don't worry. We're almost there."

"We're about to hit the Gate..."

"Good. I don't want to miss." Danny said then had to take a hurried breathe as the Gate was suddenly there. Guard were scrambling along the walkway across the top of the walls. Guns were swinging in their direction. Someone was shouting into a megaphone though Danny couldn't hear what they were saying.

He reached deep within himself and found that ragged note that began it all. There was, he was surprised to find all the power he wanted waiting for him as he breathed that note out and let it grow into the Ghostly Wail. His breathe expanded as a visible wavering wall, a tornado of energy that hit the Gates and tore them to shreds. The guards atop the towers were tossed high into the air where they floated too stunned to fly back to their stations. The towers on either side of the Gate shivered under the torrent of Danny's Ghostly Wail, then slide down into piles of rubble. The walls along the sides of the prison shuddered, cracked, parts tumbled into the prison yard were prisoners and guards alike were scrambling for shelter.

Danny swept his Wail around the prison yard into he found the doors leading into the prison proper. He concentrated the last of his energy at those doors. For a moment they rattled but withstood the eerie power being thrown at them, then abruptly exploded out.

T'Keisha pointed the Speeder at the opening Danny had made and pushed the throttle forward. Danny collapsed to his knees as the energy left him. He would have fallen out the open door but for the rope he'd tied about himself.

The slender girl followed the route Danny had sketched out, piloting the Speeder down the stairs into the basement, turning into the torch lit side of the tunnels there and stopping before the door of the last cell. Danny was just pulling himself back to his feet as she came to a stop. He grabbed a Fenton Blaster and shot down the door, snatched up a Fenton Thermos, and leaped through.

"Wha-a-a-t?" Technus 2.0 squawked before Danny shot him with the blaster, knocking the ghost to the floor. Flipping open the Thermos Danny sucked him in before he had a chance to recover. He leaped back into the Speeder yelling, "Go! Go! Go!"

T'Keisha spun the Speed around on a dime, marveling at how maneuverable it was, not realizing that the craft's aft was passing through walls like a ghost does in the material world. Danny found himself being shoved towards the center of the cabin in the process. Because he was in his ghost form he was subject to the rules of physics of the Ghost Zone even though he was instead the Spectral Speeder.

In a moment the black girl had the Speeder out of the prison and heading into the sky overhead. Vaguely Danny could see hundreds of ghost prisoners streaking off, taking their chances on freedom. Prison Guards were chasing after the escaping prisoners in ones and two, just as Danny had hoped. There were none left to pursue them as they headed back to the Fenton Portal. He staggered over to a back seat, set the thermos with Technus beside him and collapsed. He was going to tell T'Keisha something about the Portal but abruptly all power had deserted him. He's eyes closed and he knew no more.

***

It seemed like only an instant later that someone was poking Danny on the shoulder. He opened his eyes to see T'Keisha standing near him, jabbing him with the Fenton Thermos. We're at the Portal she said, backing away. "And how do you turn this thing off?" She waved the thermos. "It's been screaming something awful since we left the prison."

"Anyone following us?" Danny asked, taking the Thermos from the girl.

She shook her head, still backing away and taking shelter in the pilot's seat.

Danny dropped the Thermos on the seat. A faint shrill voice could he heard shouting "Hey, be careful!"

He took the co-pilot's seat and found the controls for the portal. He cycled it open and taking control of the Speeder from T'Keisha, piloted it through and into the lab. Without slowing down he headed into the tunnel the lead to the outside exit. The swimming pool that disguised the exit flopped out of the way, spilling its water on the lawn. Danny took the Speeder to two thousand feet and found the bearing for Chicago. He pushed the throttle to the bar. "When we cross the Indiana Toll Road follow that to Chicago. You know how to find your home from there, right? I've got a ghost to talk to."

Danny flopped down next to the Thermos. "Knock, knock"

"Who's there?" Technus answered faintly from inside the Thermos.

"Danny."

"Danny Who?"

"Danny -- Your Worst Nightmare -- Phantom."

"Is this where I'm supposed to laugh at your wit?"

"I'm not hearing any laughter."

"I'm not hearing anything funny. Child, why have you kidnaped me from that pleasant room in Walker's Prison."

"I need your help."

"No, serious, why did you kidnap me?"

Danny shook the Thermos like a snow globe for moment. "I said I need your help."

"I think I'm the one who needs help," Technus whined.

"I'm just trying to get your attention." Danny answered.

"Attention? I'm stuck in this tiny little -- and might I add very dark -- space with nothing to do or anyone to talk to but you, you have my undivided attention!"

"So are you going to help me?"

"Why should I?"

"I'll let you out of the Thermos."

"I'm starting to like it in here. It's cozy."

"You're rather stay in there then have your freedom?"

"I'm playing hard to get, child. Don't you know anything about negotiations?"

"I don't have time for that. Remember the other time I visited?"

"Yes I do. You were such a nice child -- you left! And you didn't shoot me with painful blasters."

"I also asked if you had ever heard of someone going around calling themself 'Technus 0.7'."

"An impostor!"

"But they look just like you, only cruder."

"There is only one Technus, Master of all things Technological and Mechanical. And I am that Master."

"They beg to differ."

"Then they're liars!"

"Are you going to just let them go around acting like morons while claiming to be you?"

"Never!"

"So you will help me."

"And you'll set me free afterwards?"

"In the Ghost Zone." Danny said, hopefully.

"Where Walker is after me? No way?"

"I can't hardly let you free on Earth. You keep trying to take it over."

"That is my destiny!" Technus cackled.

"And it's my destiny to kick your butt every time you try." Danny sighed. "Look, Technus, your choices are to stay in the Thermos, get sent back to Walker or do this one thing for me and be free in the Ghost Zone. You're a smart ghost" ("Did I really just say that?" Danny thought.) I think you can stay one step ahead of Walker. So what do you say?"

"Child, you strike a hard bargain, but since I don't care to remain here or to return to Walker's care I will do this thing you ask. Ah -- what it is you want me to do?"

With a sigh of relief, Danny explained.

***

"Danny," T'Keisha called. "We're nearing a big city. I guess it's Chicago, but I don't know how to find my town from here. Danny got up from the seat where he had been napping and looked out of the windshield.

"Head for that column of smoke," he said pointing to a massive tower of black smoke rising into the stratosphere off to the right. "I think that's it."

"Oh, no," she cried, then angled the Speeder towards the tower of smoke. The smoke grew rapidly in size as the Speeder made short work of the remaining distance. Danny warned T'Keisha to avoid the many helicopter circling the burning district in the city. He didn't want them seeing the Speeder, or worse, photographing it and linking the Fentons to this disaster.

As they got closer to East Gratiot, T'Keisha began to recognize landmarks and was able to pilot the Speeder to the corner park near her parent's house without help. There was a slight jar as the Speeder settled to the ground. Danny hurriedly shut down the Speeders systems. Then he grabbed T'Keisha's hand and, holding the Thermos in the other phased through the Speeder and invisibility soared to find the battle.

Sam and the others had slowly allowed themselves to be pushed back about ten blocks. The milling hordes of Technuses were levitating cars and taking them apart, or the occasional automatic door or window air conditioner. Fires burned unchecked from most of the buildings they had 'inspected'.

Sam, Tucker, Altheria and Abigail were firing only sporadically, pushing the Technuses back if they got too close, sometimes shooting at one of the clone ghosts at the far end of the group if it became to drift away from the pack. Those so stung would drift towards the kids, thus staying in the pack.

Police and fire fighters also were around the edges of the cloud. The police were trying to hold back the crowds, the firemen to put out the blazes but their vehicles, sadly, were slowly being disassembled in the air by the scores of Technuses. Hoses hooked directly to hydrants were pouring weak sprays into the nearest buildings.

Danny floated to the ground, letting go of T'Keisha."I'm back!" he called to Sam. "I've got it!" he said, waving the Thermos over his head.

"Awk, cut that out," the Thermos complained.

Danny hit the release and Technus 2.0 oozed from the Thermos. "I think I've got a kink in my back." the thin face ghost complained as it stood up.

"There's the enemy," Danny said, pointing at the scores of Technus 0.7 floating across the street from them. "What can you do about them?"

The ghost straightened his cloak and brushed back his hair. He stared at the cloned ghosts, noting their blocky half-formed form and their last century mullet and trench coats. "They're hideous!" he squawked.

"They're computer programs, so basically they're just bits of technology," Danny explained to the ghost villain. "Do you think you can handle them."

"I am Technus, Master of all things Technological! Of course I can handle them! But -- there are a lot of them..." he concluded somewhat uncertainly.

"Stop them and it's freedom in the Ghost Zone. Any funny business and its back in the Thermos." Danny warned.

"Yes, Yes, Yes!" Technus snapped. "Now leave me be. I can sense that something controls these clones but it's hard for me to isolate and master it."

The cloaked, blue-skinned ghost slowly rose into the air, facing the clones. They, likewise, turned to face him, clumping up into a half-circle around him. The half-disassembled cars and trucks behind them crashed to the ground as the clone ghost lost interest in them.

After a while Technus raised one arm high in the air. The clones followed suit. He pulled his arm back. So did they. Them he pumped his arm several times in the air, the clones following in perfect synchronism. Then he pumped the other arm.

"Is that 'thing' doing the Saturday Night Fever dance?" Altheria asked as she and Abigail joined Sam and Tucker.

"Is that a movie?" Tucker asked in all sincerity.

"Chick flick," Sam explained.

"Just shut them down!" Danny hollered from the ground up to the floating Technus 2.0.

"Yes -- of course. -- That was the bargain." Technus lazily answered. "So many minions -- and all under my control ---"

"Shut them down!" Danny hollered impatiently.

"Yes -- yes --"

The clones began flickering out in rows.

"No!" Technus shouted. "This is too great an opportunity. I am Technus, Master of all things Mechanical and Technological! It is my destiny to rule this world!" the clones began reappearing in rows as they had disappeared.

"Arise my clones, my minions. Together we are invincib--"

Technus felt a tapping on his shoulder.

"What?" he squawked, spinning around in mid-air.

Danny was floating beside him, a blaster in one hand and the Thermos in the other.

"We had a bargain," he said.

"No one tells Technus, master of technology what to do."

"Say 'Good Night, Gracie"

"Who's Gracie?" Technus wonder as the blaster flared. When the pain stopped he was once again inside the Thermos.

Danny watched as the clones Technus has reappeared evaporated when the ghost lost consciousness. The sky was suddenly clear of ghost. Danny dropped to the ground where Tucker had put aside his blaster and was sweeping the area with a Fenton Finder.

"No ghosts but you," he told Danny. "Good thing you were ready with that Thermos when Technus tried to take over the clones."

"I expected it. It is in his nature, you know. He always tried to take over the world. And always loses sight of what is going on around him. Um, let's get out of here before any cops try to stop us. Or the Guys in White show up. I've got to take the Specter Speeder back and will -- Danny Fenton will -- catch up with you at the hotel, OK?"

The others hurried away from the fire. T'Keisha lingered. "My God," she whispered. "I can't believe it's all gone. Couldn't you have stopped this, some how."

"I can do something about the fires now but once Technus 0.7 started cloning himself from those computers it was more than I could handle," Danny Phantom paused. "You know, you handled yourself really well in the Ghost Zone. I couldn't have gotten the real Technus without your help, and without him this would have just kept spreading. You really helped save the day."

"There's so much destruction." She looked at the fires, unable to look at Danny.

"I guess that's why superheros wear masks, too much collateral damage."

"Oh, yeah, that TV show."

"Futurama."

Danny was anxious to get T'Keisha out of the area. He could see policemen working their way through to debris towards them, but he didn't was to push the girl, either. "There are parts of Amity Park that look like this, too. All burned up," he said. "Too many fights with too many ghosts."

"Yes," T;Keisha sighed. "I should get back home. I'm sure my parents are worried about me."

"But they think you're at the comics convention in Chicago. They will expect you to be at the hotel, safe and removed from all of this."

"You want me to go back to the hotel? But what if they're hurt?"

"Do either of them work around here?"

"No."

"Then they're safe. We passed your house coming here so we know that it's alright. Go to the hotel -- then call them, say you just heard about it on the news."

She nodded in a rustle of beaded cornrows. "And you're going to put out the fires?"

"I'll do what I can to help."

She turned and ran after the others. Danny searched around the corner they'd been standing on to make sure there was no incriminating evidence left behind, then took to the air.

He smashed fire hydrants as he came to them and directed the water spraying out into the nearby burning buildings. Some of the water he gathered up in an ectoplasm formed bottle and carried deeper into the ring of fire, dousing some of the fires there, forming something of a lane for the firemen to advance into. Surprisingly a few people popped out of basements in some of the buildings and dashed for safety. Danny hoped there weren't anyone dead here.

After fifteen minutes Danny decided he had done all that he could. Some of the fires were out, many were greatly reduced in intensity. More fire trucks were arriving now, so it looked like everything was under control.

He flew back to the corner park, passing over his friends along the way, making sure that they were getting away cleanly. Back in the park he opened the Speeder and brought up the engines; sent it aloft and programmed it to return to FentonWorks. He set a timer to sound a few miles from the place and wearily leaned back in the pilot's chair. He was asleep before he had fully closed his eyes.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8 -- Home Invasion

Jack Fenton was humming to himself as he entered the lab in the FentonWorks basement. He was looking for an thingamajig to fix the framinstat. Jack knew what he needed he wasn't always clean on what exactly it was called.

He walked pass the empty cradle for the Specter Speeder to a workbench where he opened a deep drawer and fumbled around in it for a moment before extracting something looked like a cross between a hand clamp and a dentist's drill. He spun the drill a couple times to test if the battery was still charged and turned and walked back to the stairs. As he was putting his foot on the first step he looked back at the room, puzzled. Something was misplaced. The box of half-eaten pizza? No, he's finished that earlier. Had he left the barrier to the Ghost Zone Portal open -- again? No, that was tightly shut. Had he left his Packer's sweatshirt in the Specter Speeder? He looked over to the empty cradle. Hmmmm?

Jack went upstair to the kitchen where Maddie, fully encased in her hazmat uniform, hood pulled over her wavy auburn hair, goggles fixed over her eyes was pouring a kettle of pasta into a strainer in the sink.

"Ahh, spaghetti-- " Jack savored the smell of hot starch-laden water. Then he remembered why he came up stairs. "Maddie, love, do you remember where I left my Packer's sweater? There's a practice game on the cable and I want to be ready."

"I saw it in the Specter Speeder, Sweetie." Maddie added a stick of butter to the hot pasta and swirled it around to coat all the strands.

"The Specter Speeder's gone. Did one of the kids borrow it?"

"You told them to stop taking it out on joy-rides, remember."

"That I remember. But it's still not here."

"Well, it must be here, Jack. The kids are at that comics convention so there's no one who could possibly have taken it."

"Ah, yes, the comics convention. I remember going to my first ghost convention... I met you there..."

"Jack, sweetie. We met in college, at Professor Bushrod's class on Ectoplasmic physics."

"Ah, yes. It was love at first sight."

"I was the only girl there. And had gone out on two dates with Vlad Masters before you even noticed me."

"And you married me anyway."

"Vlad was always way too controlling. And he never made me laugh like you did."

"And you were the only one who laughed with me and not at me." Jack reached over and kissed her.

"Oh, Jack," she purred.

"None the less the Specter Speeder is missing."

"Well, that's just not so. Come on, I'll show you." Maddie turned the heat down on the sauce and lead Jack back to the stairs.

***

Danny's stomach was growling by the time he saw Amity Park raising in the distance. Not that he ever eat or drank while in his ghost form. It seemed not to need conventional food. But he still got hunger around lunch and dinner time, as if his regular body was still there, somewhere, sending him reminders. At the moment he was bone tired more so than he was hungry. He found the brightly lit FentonWorks sign ahead and, taking the Speeder intangible, swooped through the walls of the brownstone building and into the basement. Carefully he sat the craft down on its cradle and began shutting down the systems. He closed his eyes for a moment, knowing that it would be a long trip flying back to Chicago.

His eyes popped open just as quickly as he heard his parents coming down the stairs. He turned invisible just as they entered the room. His father looked flabbergasted. "It wasn't here a minute ago," he argued.

"Of course it was, honey," his mother was saying. "You know how absent-minded you are. let's get your sweater and go have supper."

"But I could have swore..." Jack insisted, then followed his wife into the Speeder. He found his sweater wadded up on the floor. Maddie picked it up and shook it out. It feel into several pieces. "Now that's strange," she muttered. "It looks like it's been through a war."

Danny decided he didn't want to find out what they thought of that, and speed out of the building and back to the sunset and Chicago.

***

Danny flew straight to the hotel, changed into his human self in an empty bathroom and rode the elevator up to their room. Despite the time spent traveling to and from Amity Park returning the Specter Speeder, he arrived only a short time after the other had. He had worked out a story, lame as it was, about staying behind to make sure all the Technuses had been captured and the scene was safe until the Guys in White appeared. He'd also been guarding the back of the appliance store to deal with any Technuses who tried to get out that way.

He hated lying to his friends, especially when it was such an unbelievably lame effort, but they didn't seem to question him, which was a relief. It was a pain in the neck working with a 'Team Fenton' that didn't know he was a ghost. It was so much easier just doing things with Sam and Tucker. He never had to explain to them where Danny Fenton was while he was being Danny Phantom. It would be so much easier if he could explain to the others who and what he was, but as long as Abigail was a part of the 'team' and as long as she was determined to be a Guy in White, he could never afford to let her know he was a ghost.

They'd picked up some pizza on the way back to the hotel. Danny had a slice then laid down. Without his ghost form's supernatural sources of energy, Danny was suddenly exhausted. He was asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.

***

Some time later a clatter of voices from the other room intruded on his rest. Apparently Jazz and Sid had returned from their day of shopping.

Jazz asked, casually, how they day went.

Altheria replied, "Haven't you heard the news?" as if someone shopping kept one ear to a radio.

Jazz must have looked baffled because after a pause Altheria went on, "half of East Gratiot is up in smoke."

"Oh, my god!" Jazz exclaimed. 'Is your family alright?" This was clearly addressed to T'Keisha. Danny couldn't hear her reply. Tucker cut in, though, to say that the destruction was confined to only a few blocks and that it wasn't nearly as bad as all that.

T'Keisha must has said something else because after a moment Danny could hear Tucker speaking softly and not intelligible in the boys room where Danny was pretending to be asleep."There were hundreds of Technuses. They kept pouring out of this appliance store. I thought we were going to be over-run." That was Altheria, dramatizing events.

"There were only eighty to a hundred." Danny held his breath as Abigail spoke. "And their numbers stopped increasing once the store exploded. What did you say that was?"

"The Ghostly Wail," said Sam as if the words were being tortured out of her.

"But they were more than we could handle," Abigail continued, "and were driving us back."

"And taking stuff apart like a kid exploring a tinker toy town," Altheria, still not sensing how upset T'Keisha was about having even a part of her town destroyed.

"Danny brought in Technus to shut the clones down," Tucker spoke.

"He brought Technus to Earth!" Jazz shouted. Even in the other room Danny kind of winced at that. "Where is he?" Jazz demanded.

"On the desk."

"That's a Thermos. Where's Danny?"

"Ah," that was Sam, trying to sound a warning to Jazz. "Your brother is sleeping in the other room. Ghost boy is returning the Specter Speeder."

There must have been a snarl from Jazz but before Danny could be sure his sister had stormed into the boys room, slamming the door behind her. She threw the light on and shook him roughly by the shoulder.

"What?" Danny asked, pretending to be just waking up.

"Why did you bring Technus here?"

"There were too many clones, Jazz. I never expected them to start multiplying in that appliance store and then it was too late to do anything but destroy the store so they couldn't make any more."

"You couldn't call in Mom and Dad? Or the Guys in White?"

"Not enough man-power, not enough time."

"He was in Walker's Prison! How did you get him out of there?"

"I sort of blew it up."

"So we've got Walker coming after you -- again! And a megalomaniacal ghost in the next room?"

"No, Vlad is in Wisconsin. Technus is only maniacal."

"He could have used that clones to take over the world.!"

"He tried. That's why he's back in the thermos."

"Grrrrr," Jazz got up and stormed around the room for a bit.

"And you borrowed the Specter Speeder? Why did you have me drive all you down here if you were going to steal the Speeder?"

"I didn't think we would need the Speeder but when I had to get Technus it was the fastest way to get back here with him."

"What if Mom or Dad find it missing?"

"I think maybe Dad did."

"WHAT!"

"Keep your voice down," Danny warned. 'I think Dad may have seen it missing but I'm counting on his absent-mindedness to explain it away."

"Dad is absent-minded," Jazz thought for a moment. "So why didn't you throw Technus back in the Ghost Zone when you took the Speeder back?"

"Because he tried to take over the world. We had an agreement. No taking over the world today. He broke the agreement, so he's spending a couple days in the Thermos."

"Are you insane? He's dangerous!"

"Relax, Jazz. No one has ever escaped from the Fenton Thermos. Not me, not Vlad, Dark Dan and certainly not our so-called Master of all things technical."

"Danny, you're just inviting trouble. I want you to get rid of him immediately."

"Jazz, I've already flown to Amity Park and back once today. I'm not doing it again."

Danny rolled over and closed his eyes as if to say 'this interview is over,' but Jazz grabbed his shoulder and rolled him back to where she could look him in the eye. "Ohhhh," she growled, "and to think I bought you a souvenir."

"Really?" Danny shot up in bed, "what is it?"

Jazz pushed him back down, "You're not getting it now because you're being such brat!"

"Aww, Jazz..."

"Brat!" and she stormed out of the room.

***

Danny tried going back to sleep but it wouldn't come. He got up and wandered into the next room to see what everyone else was up to.

Jazz was piling up empty pizza boxes in corner by the door, picking up empty pop cans and tossing them into the bathroom trash can and otherwise straightened up the room. Danny couldn't recall ever seeing her being that fussy at home but maybe she was trying to compensate for not actually being part of the group.

"Is there any pizza left?" he asked. "I only had a slice earlier."

Silently, Jazz handed him a box from the desk. It was vegetarian, with a lot of olives, which Danny hated. He picked out the olives then nibbled the cleared areas. He'd never had broccoli, cauliflower and carrots on a pizza before but it wasn't bad.. He knew this had to be Sam's pizza. Fortunately she wasn't one of those vegetarians who shunned milk and cheese as well. Plenty of cheese had been piled up on this one.

Sid was ensconced in the one padded chair in the room. He had his shoes kicked off and looked tired. From the way he was constantly moving about in the chair and wiggling the toes of his feet Danny guessed he was sore from all the walking and standing around he and Jazz had done that day. Tucker and T'Keisha sat on the end of the first bed, Tucker with his arm around the girl, T'Keisha laying her head on his shoulder. Every so often she would sniff and wipe her eyes.

Sam, Altheria and Abigail were scattered around the other bed, sometimes watching Tucker and T'Keisha, sometimes watching as baseball game Sid had turned on and sometimes watching Jazz fuss about the room. Sam must have showered after they came back because she was wearing her different clothes -- her usual plaid skirt and dark belly Tee. Altheria must also have showered. The grape was gone from her hair, which was a surprising honey blonde. The sort of blonde so many girls would die for. Trust Altheria to hide her prettiest feature under some weird kool-aid dye job, Danny thought.

Abigail had put on a short sleeves Tee and was rubbing lotion onto her arms. Several band-aids were stuck on her face but overall she didn't look as bad as she had when hit by the ghost they'd fought at Camp Sleepy Hollow.

The last trash picked up, Jazz sat down at the room's desk and began removing stuff from her shopping bags, unwrapping them and admiring the things she'd bought. There were a couple of shirts, a skirt and a dress that looked like it was only half there. Danny could imagine the fight that would spawn the first time Jazz tried to wear it. From the way Sid was blushing maybe she already had. The girls, of course, were cooing over it -- well at least Abigail was. Altheria didn't look like the type who would ever wear a dress, Sam preferred things in dark colors and this was a kind of bold peach color that matched Jazz's hair. And T'Keisha was too upset over the damage done to her city.

Jazz proceed to unwrap and rewrap several small figurines. Danny thought one of them was a paperweight bust of Sigmund Freud. There was some jewelry, which Alteria did find interesting, earrings, a necklace. Jazz folded one bag over something that looked like an over-sized book, apparently the souvenir he wasn't getting.

Afer wrapping all her purchases up and packing them carefully in a couple of the pricier shopping bags, Jazz turned to Danny.

"What are you guys planning on doing tomorrow now that you've caught your ghost?"

"Rest. I think we all had a pretty hard day today," Danny suggested.

"I was thinking of going to Navy Pier,' Sid said. 'I hear it's pretty awesome."

"If you like ferris wheels," Alteria said, "And that kind of childish stuff."

"What's wrong with liking ferris wheels?"

"I thought we could go to the Science and Industry Museum," Tucker suggested.

"Art Institute." That was Sam's suggestion.

"I think you ought to work on your alibi,' Jazz said.

"What alibi? No one saw us today." Danny asked, confused.

"Your so-called Comics Convention. There may not actually be one this weekend but Mom and Dad think there is and they will be surprised if you come back without any convention goodies."

"Oh," Danny was surprised that he hadn't thought of that before. His mind was flying with questions, where was he going to get souvenir bags, logoed caps, autographed comics, the sort of stuff one tended to pick up a convention.

"If you just need some comics I know a pretty good shop near my home. It's close to the train station so you should be able to get there from here easily enough. It also has figurines, manga, some movie posters and they always have flyers all over the place for other conventions.""Nothing says convention like flyers for other conventions," Tucker quipped.

"I've got to go out in public looking like this?" Abigail groused.

"You don't have to come, if you don't want to," Sam reminded the red-head cheerfully. "This is really just for Danny, Tucker and I since we're the ones who told our parents we're going to a comics convention."

"And sit around in this hotel all day? No way. I'm coming." Abigail looked like she wanted to stick her tongue out at Sam but thought wiser of it.

"I should go, too," T'Keisha said, "If my Daddy will let me. I told him I was going to a convention, too, so I should pick up some comics."

"Great," Tucker exclaimed, not realizing before that T'Keisha might be grounded because of the troubles in her home town.

Sid said he'd go, too. Jazz didn't seem too affected by his desertion. Danny guessed that Sid hadn't been prepared for Jazz's all day marathon shopping.

"Ok, what time do we want to go?" Danny asked.

"Time? Oh, no!" T'Keisha suddenly exclaimed. "Daddy told me to be home by nine O'clock and its already eight-thirty. I'll never get home in time. He is going to be so mad."

"No problem," Danny suggested. "I'll call Danny Phantom. He can fly you to your home and get you there well before nine."

T'Keisha looked at Danny intently for a moment, then looked away. "No, don't bother. I'm sure he's very tired. I'll just call home and tell them I'll be late."

"It's be no problem. I'm sure he's rested up from today, and would hate to see you get in trouble with your parents." Danny argued.

Tucker was looking at her funny, as well. "What's the problem?" he asked.

"It's nothing," she protested.

"Does the flying bother you, because the first couple times it did me?"

"No that's not it," she said but she wouldn't elaborate.

Danny hopped from his seat and grabbed her hand, "Come on, lets get you home," pulling her towards the door before she could argue.

She resisted for a moment before finally giving in, afraid to make a scene in front of her new found friends. But when Danny lead her to a secluded area near the vending machines on their floor she pulled free and said "You don't have to pretend, Danny."

"What?" Danny pulled up short, confused.

"You're not going to 'call' Danny Phantom -- because you ARE Danny Phantom."Danny blanched. Icy fingers tickled down his spine. His vision actually darkened for a moment. He put a hand on the hall to steady himself.

"No, I'm not. Do I look like a ghost? Do I look anything like him." Sam and Tucker had frequently reassured Danny that as a ghost he neither looked or talked anything like he did normally. There was some kind of spectral aura that changed people's perception of him.

"I don't know about that but I just spent all afternoon listening to you, never looking at you, just listening and I realized that you talk just like you do when you're not a ghost. I was constantly confusing what 'Danny Phantom' was saying with what Danny 'Fenton' would said."Danny leaned back against the hotel corridor's wall, then slowly slide to the floor. He was just shaking his head and softly muttering 'god' over and over.

"Just say you are and take me home, OK?"

"You just guessed? By listening to me? How many other people know? Did you tell anyone? I am so screwed!"

"I'm sorry," T'Keisha said after a moment, in embarrassment. "I didn't know it was so important to you. I mean it seemed so obvious to me." After a moment she added, "I haven't told anyone. I thought about maybe telling Tucker because I thought he already knew, then I thought maybe I should talk to you first."

"Thanks. I appreciate that." With an effort Danny got to his feet again. "Oh, man," he said to no one in particular, then wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "I can't believe I'm crying like a girl." He looked up at T'Keisha and hastily added, "No offense intended."

"You know, crying is one of the ways the body dumps excess hormones out of the brain." "Really?"

"That's why crying is good for you."

"How do you know all this stuff?" Danny wonder. T'Keisha just shrugged.

"Man, I can't stop thinking about what all this means." Danny was walking in circles, muttering.

"I won't tell anyone if that's what you want. Honest I won't."

"Thanks.' Danny waved his hand uncertainly. "You -- home -- we've gotta do that first. I've got to change. Would you rather I went around the corner to do that?"

T'Keisha nodded.

"Ok -- ah -- the screaming isn't normally part of the process so don't pay any attention to it."

"Screaming?" But Danny had already vanished around the corner. There was a brief flash of light followed by a deep groan. When he came back he was dressed in a black jumpsuit with the letter D on the chest. "I must be getting better," he mumbled, "That didn't hurt nearly as much as it did this morning."

"Are you hurt?" T'Keisha asked even as she turned away from Danny's face.

"Got blasted a couple days ago. I was beginning to think it wasn't ever going to heal. Must have been all the time I spent today as Danny Phantom."

He paused. "How do you want to do this. I can levitate you with just the touch of your hand."

"I think I'd rather ride on your back. I'd feel safer that way."

"Fine by me. Just -- no choking, OK?"

Danny found himself almost swallowed up by T'Keisha's long legs and arms as she climbed on to his back. When she was settled Danny phased through the hotel walls and unto the night sky. He got his orientation and took off towards East Gratiot. As they flew he told her about how he have been turned into Danny Phantom and that indeed Tucker and Sam and Jazz all knew about his double life.

He let her off a block from her house and stayed long enough to see her go in. A look at his watch showed that it was three minutes to Nine. Cutting it kind of close.

Danny pushed himself into the air and drifted back to the hotel a lot slower than he had come out. He was still in shock over T'Keisha guessing his secret. If she could guess it after knowing him for such a short while, how many other people knew or at least guessed than Danny Fenton was also Danny Phantom.

***

As he neared the hotel Danny found himself reluctant to return to their rooms. He looked to the north where the downtown was ablaze in lights. He considered cruising through there seeing what all the excitement was all about. But he didn't want to do it as a ghost, invisible to all others. And he didn't feel like changing, even though it hurt a lot less than it did before. It still hurt -- a lot.

The top of hotel was divided into a number of sections. One area was all vents and air conditioner units, another was filled with numerous lights, small tables and lots of people milling about. Danny guessed that was a patio for a bar. Off to the side was another area, set off by fencing, filled with larger tables. The restaurant's patio, closed now for the evening. He found a spot as removed from the bar's patio as possible and settled down on the wall surrounding the restaurant area and brooded.

"There you are?"

A girl's voice cut through the night some time later.

"Sam?"

"No, it's me," Altheria said, walking up to Danny. "Why did you think I was Sam? Were you expecting her? Do you two have some secret thing going on? Does Fenton know? 'Cause he seem to have a thing for Sam, too."

While she was speaking Altheria had grabbed one of the painted iron chairs from a near- by table and drawn it up next to the wall, which was chest high. Higher than normal for a wall, anyway, to keep people from falling over. Before Danny knew it, she had humped her butt up on the wall and was starting to swing her legs over the edge.

"What are you doing? Don't. It's too dangerous up here."

"I bet the view is wonderful. Why else would you be sitting on a wall out here?" Altheria had both feet dangling over the edge of the wall now. Swinging them with carefree ease. "Not as great a view as advertise. But straight down -- now that's a view!"

"Be careful. You could fall."

"So could you."

"I'm a ghost. I can fly." Danny explained.

"Then you'll catch me if I fall."

"We're not up high enough,"Danny complained. "You'd probably hit the ground before I realized what was happening."

"I'm sure you can react faster than that." Altheria continued to look through her legs at the ground below. After a moment she asked, "You ever hear voices, when you're up high someplace, looking down, telling you to jump?"

Danny spun and grabbed an arm and held on to it tightly. "The only voices I ever hear are the ones telling me not to do stupid stuff."he said.

The girl shook her arm but Danny wouldn't let go. "I'm not going to jump," she said. 'I tried that already. It wasn't fun."

"You jumped?"

"Naw, tried to cut my wrists." Altheria held out her wrist for Danny's inspection but in the dark he couldn't see anything. "Did it all wrong according to the experts in the loony bin. Superficial cut with lots of blood. Mom rushed my to the hospital then threw me in the looney bin. Now there's a place that will depress you. You go in thinking no one in the whole world could be as unhappy and messed up as you are, only to find that compared to all the other inmates, you're the normal one."

"I'd love to be normal," Danny muttered quietly, but Altheria heard him anyway.

"Don't you like being a ghost?" she nudged.

"It's no fun."

"Not even the flying part, because I would love to be able to fly? What wouldn't I give to be able to soar above the cloud, to see the world from a thousand miles high and put all the cares and suffering behind me. Isn't that worth being a ghost?"

Danny looked at the punk girl for a moment, wondering where all that had come from. For a moment he had felt a connection with her. While being a ghost sucked since all it meant was fighting one ghost or another all the time, he did have to admit that the flying part was nice. But then his spirits fell. "There's nothing up there," he answered, "No air a thousand -- even ten -- miles up. Eventually you always have to come back down.

"Yeah? Bummer. So they put me on Valium and Prozac afterwards. The Valiums made me loopy in a pleasant sort of way; the Prozac just seemed to be feeding the darkness. Then I heard on the news that Prozac was linked to teen-age suicides. I flushed them down the toilet and never went back."

"Did that help?"

"I'm sitting on the wall of a hotel seven stories up talking to a ghost. I have so much metal stuck in my skin that I can set off metal detectors without ever walking through them. Does that answer your question?"

No, Danny thought, but he didn't care for this topic at all. "Why would you want to talk to a ghost?" he asked instead.

"Curiosity, of course. What's it like being dead? What was it like dying? Cutting my wrists was painful. Does dying always hurt? Does anything change for the better in the afterlife?"

Danny almost blurted out "I'm not dead" to stop her asking these questions, then remembered that if he told her that, he would have to explain how he could be a ghost but not dead. Searching for an answer he thought back to the day he did become a ghost. 'It hurt. A lot. I've never felt such pain before or since. It was like I was being pulled in two then had salt rubbed into every pore."

"Ew! How did you die," Alteria persisted. "Did you fall off a building? Get hit by a truck?"

"It was an electrical thing."

"Shocking." She said, then started laughing. "O, God, I'm sorry. That must not be very funny to you. 'Shocking'." She continued laughing.

She was bent over laughing so hard that Danny was afraid she's lose her balance.

"Altheria, If I come down off the wall, will you come down, too?"

Altheria sat up but instead of swinging her feet back over the wall, she suddenly leaned in to Danny and kissed him, hard, full on the lips.

She caught him by surprise and in a bit of a panic Danny tried to scramble back away from her -- and fell off the wall to the patio floor. Altheria caught herself as she fell into the space where Danny had been a moment before. She looked at him lying on the patio floor looking as shocked and dismayed as a ghost could and asked, "What was that all about?"

A question Danny himself was asking.

Altheria swung her legs over the wall and slipped down to the floor, then swatted beside Danny who was still too shocked to move.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Yeah," Danny grunted then started to sit up.

"What happened? You acted like you'd never been kissed before?"

"Not like that," he said getting to his feet.

"You died before you'd ever been kissed by a girl? That is so sad."

"What were you thinking? You could have knocked us both off?" Danny complained.

"I just wondered what it would feel like to kiss a ghost."

"You could have warned me."

"You would have said no. Besides you never warn someone when you're about to kiss them. It takes all the magic away."

" 'Magic?' On top a seven story building I think a little warning would have been a good idea." Danny complained.

"Oh, come on," Altheria persisted, "don't tell me you didn't enjoy it."

"I think I've had enough human company for the night," Danny said, starting to walk away. He paused and turned around. "Did you -- enjoy it?" he asked.

"A girl never kisses and tells," Altheria laughed.

Danny walked a way a few paces and turned invisible. He waited till Altheria left the restaurant patio and rode the elevator down to their rooms. He watched her slide the card pass through the door lock and enter. He waited a good ten minutes before drifting down to the vending machine alcove, which was empty and changed back to Danny Fenton. He walked back, slide his pass card through the lock and found his bed. He dropped his jeans and shirt on the floor and crawled in but sleep eluded him for some time. His lips tingled from Alteria's touch.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9 -- I am Not Ann Landers

Morning came too early for Danny. Someone knocking on their door proved to be T'Keisha, keeping up with the fantasy of a comics convention. It took a while but soon everyone was up, dressed, occasionally showered first, and stumbling out the doors into glaring hot sun.

Jazz caught a training heading downtown while the others caught a cross-town line out to where Altheria lived. Danny wondered why Altheria hadn't offered to drive until he heard that her car was an old VW Beetle, one of the original models with half a floorboard and no back seat. Danny was astonished to learn that you could buy cars "as-in" for under a hundred dollars and somewhat horrified by her tales of her fenders flapping in the breeze. Come Christmas he vowed so send her a package of chewing gum, baling wire and duct tape. Lots of duct tape.

The comics shop, Galactic Central's Comic Emporium, was a mile beyond the train station. As they walked along the empty streets out to it Danny started lagging behind. Altheria had set a stiff pace the others were finding hard to keep up with. As he watched the others pull ahead he realized he was relieved by the solitude. It gave him more time to mope about T'Keisha knowing his secret.

Unexpectedly he saw Sid stop to look at something in a shop window. It was a re-sale shop and he wondered what Sid could have found interesting there. Until Sid abruptly turned and fell into step with him as Danny passed.

They walked in silence for a minute. "I've got this problem," Sid finally announced. "It's about Altheria."

Danny didn't know what to say about that. He'd been kind of avoiding her all morning. Because of what happened last night.

"I thought we were kind of tight, you know, but today, I don't know, she's been like kind of short with me."

"Have you asked her what the problem is?" Danny wondered, instantly regretting encouraging Sid.

"A Dude can't ask a Lady something like that."

"Altheria isn't exactly a lady," Danny reminded him.

"But still...."

"Think about it, Sid. Do you think there might be something you've done that might have upset her?"

"Well..."

Danny sighed. "Sid, you spent the whole day, yesterday with my sister. I think Altheria came in to town as much to see you as to help us."

"Oh."

"So, yeah, she might be a little miffed."

"What should I do, man?"

"I think you need to ask yourself who you'd rather be with -- Altheria or my sister."

"Altheria's cool, but your sister is so hawt!"

"Sid," Danny began, rather annoyed with the big fellow. "There are two words I never want to hear in the same sentence, ok? That's 'Jazz' and 'hawt.' She's not hot, she's my sister, OK? And the same goes for my mother."

"But she's hawt, too."

"Sid, you're not listening. Never use the phrase 'hot' about anyone in my family ever again."

"So you don't want me going out with your sister?"

"That's something for you and Jazz to work out. Just don't call her hot to my face, ok?"

"So you do want me to date your sister?"

"We're not talking about my sister! I thought you wanted to know why Altheria might be unhappy with you today?"

"Oh, yeah,"

"And I said she might be unhappy because you spent all of yesterday with my sister instead of her."

"Oh. So, like, what should I do?"

"That part I don't know."

"So, should I, like, talk to her?"

"It couldn't hurt."

Sid continued walking with Danny for another minute, apparently digesting what Danny had said. Then he lengthened his stride and caught up with the others.

Danny shook his head. What a day.

The light had turned red so the others had stopped at the corner. Short of pretending to tie his shoe Danny was unable to avoid catching up with them before the light turned green. He let the others go first then took a slow step. As he stepped off the curb he was surprised to find Altheria by his side.

Thinking about last night brought a blush to Danny's cheeks, which, fortuitously, the punk girl didn't notice. Of course she thought the Danny Phantom she's kissed the night before was someone else. That didn't make Danny feel any better about the position he found himself in.

He waited for Altheria to make the first move.

It didn't take long.

"So what did tall, thin dumb had to say?" she asked.

"Sid? He thought you were mad at him for some reason."

"He noticed?"

"Apparently."

"I thought he was going to follow your sister around all weekend with his tongue dragging on the ground."

"I think he found out that Jazz is" -- Danny thought for the right word. The words he usually thought about his sister -- stuck-up snotty, intrusive -- weren't really fair. And besides you never slag your family in front of strangers. It was just one of those rules Danny had always lived by. "Jazz is kind of 'high maintenance'." he suggested. "After all Sid did decide to come with us then go shopping with Jazz a second day."

"Humph!" Altheria snorted then thought for a bit.

"How long are you going to torture him?" Danny asked. "Sid's not such a bad guy."

"I don't know," Altheria smiled cruelly. "The masochistic school of dating suggests one should wait as long as possible before forgiving someone."

"Masochistic School of dating...."

"Playing hard to get. It's more fun then the oblivious school of dating you and Sam seem stuck in."

"We're not dating." Danny protested.

"Why not?"

Danny colored at the question but couldn't think of a good answer. "People dating always break up," he finally forced out. "I don't want to lose Sam as a friend."

"If she's a real friend you'll never lose her as a friend"

I don't want to find out if you're wrong, Danny thought. He didn't care to be grilled about him and Sam. He didn't want to be forced into anything. He didn't want to be forced into a relationship when he was still getting to know Sam as a friend.

"How would you know?" he snapped back at Altheria. "You were the one the other day saying all men were scum. Doesn't sound like you've found many good friends."

"Prick," she snarled and stalked off to catch up with the rest of the group.

As Altheria stormed past the others into the lead, Danny saw T'Keisha whisper something to Tucker, then stopped and waited for Danny to catch up.

"I'm really sorry about last night," she said in her soft voice. "I didn't mean to hurt you. I should have just kept my big fat mouth shut."

"It's all right, T'Keisha. Water over the bridge. Or is it under?"

"I think water goes under a bridge."

Danny noticed that she was avoiding looking at him and mentioned that to her.

She turned to him and smiled with a big, toothy grin. "I can look at you now. It's just -- I'm kind of shy around people I don't know very well. And I kinda got the impression you didn't like me."

"Oh, sorry," Danny said as he realized that what she said was probably somewhat true. "I think it's because most of the time I've seen you it's like 3 O'clock in the morning and I've just been pulled out of bed. I'm kind of cranky when that happens."

"I hope that we can be friends."

"I'm sure we will. When I said you were the best thing that's ever happen to Tucker, I meant it."

"But we live so far away..."

"What with the internet and all, I imagine it's a lot less worse than it was in our parent's day."

"You don't think he'll find someone else, someone close?"

"Someone better than you -- no."

She smiled at that.

"I haven't talked to Tucker yet about knowing your -- secret."

"Try to do it in person, OK? Nothing on the Internet or over the phone. You never know when either of those are being tapped."

"Why would --"

"The Guys in White are pretty paranoid about my Dad. Who knows how far they'd go to find out what Dad knows. Not that he knows anything special, but government agencies -- I always feel paranoid about them."

"What about Abigail?"

"Especially Abigail."

"Why did you invite her along, then?"

"I didn't. She invited herself to this party.

"Oh."

"Look, why don't you, Tucker and I go for a little walk tonight? We'll find a quiet spot and have a long talk."

"That would be good."

Tucker was waiting outside the comics shop when T'Keisha caught up. He whispered something to her kind of possessively but she just laughed, gave him a kiss and skipped into the store.

***

The shop was larger than any Danny had ever seen in Amity park. One long wall was lined with shelves full of the latest issues. On the other wall were glass topped counters for movie memorabilia, game cards, D&D figurines and, behind the counters, tall shelves filled with pricy collectable comics. In the back was a field of waist high tables where back issue common comics were open for people to paw through. A corner in the back had, of all things, a selection of model train parts and accessories. Danny's jaw dropped when he saw the price on an ordinary seeming model box car. The other back corner of the store was walled off for adult comics and material. Manga, graphic novels, some science fiction filled free standing shelves in the middle of the building along with wire racks of action figures of every size, shape and character. The irony was that not only were there more comics here then he could ever hope to read, he had to grab up a huge bundle to make it look like he had got them at a convention. Which meant paying cash, and not putting it on the company credit card.

Danny was slowly working down the shelf of recent issues, browsing each new issue before adding it to his stack when Sam came around and handed him a canvas bag with the store's logo on the side. "Now this will add verisimilitude to your story." she said.

"Add what?"

"Credibility." Sam had already filled her bag with a variety of action figures. Witchblade was conspicuously on top.

"Planning your Halloween costume?" he suggested, pointing to the box.

"You wish," Sam laughed. "I'm starting a collection of Gothic dolls and figurines. If you see a twelve inch Barbie dressed as Elvira call me."

Later, while Danny was still only half away along the long row of new comics he noticed Sid coming out of the adult comics section grinning like he had pulled off something. At the time Danny thought it was just for getting in and out without being caught but later, as they were walking back to the train station he saw Sid slip something out of his shirt and hand it to Altheria.

The kids finally gave up shopping a couple hours later. They had looked over all the new comics, flipped through the older issues (where Danny found the remaining eight issues of the "Space Conquerors"series he had started collecting when he was ten. Sam had filled her store bag and two paper bags with Goth themes action figures. She hadn't found an Elvira Barbie doll but she did pick up four Bratz dolls. Sam said they were "biker chic" but Danny thought of them as more S&M.

Sam had also made sure that Danny and Tucker were weighted down with flyers for upcoming local comics shows. She'd even found a program book from the real Comics-Con which, because it wasn't dated, added nicely to the pile ersatz convention loot.

They had barely started the long march back to the train station when Tucker sidled next to Danny.

"What's going on with T'Keisha?" he asked.

Danny shrugged.

"Come on, man, you must know something. She's been acting kind of strange all morning, looking at me then acting like she wasn't looking at me. Then she went off and talked to you. What was that all about?"

"She was just trying to get to know your friends better," A bit of a lie but Danny didn't want to make his friend any more worried than he was already.

"Then why did she wait to do until it was just you and her? You were talking about me behind my back, weren't you?"

"Tuck I didn't tell her anything that I wouldn't say to your face. I think what you've got is a great thing and won't do anything to screw it up."

"Then why is she acting so jumpy today?"

"Well, yesterday was pretty stressful for her. First the fight with Technus then getting hustled into the Ghost Zone and having her town all shot up. I imagine her nerves are pretty shot."

Danny looked to see if any of this was mollifying his friend.

"She said something about you and her going for a walk later tonight."

"No," Danny corrected, "the idea is for YOU, her and I going for a walk tonight."

"Why do you have to be along?"

"To keep you two from doing anything you shouldn't?" Danny teased.

"Be serous, man. This is driving me crazy.."

"It's driving me crazy, too, Tucker, but its not something we can talk about walking about on the street. Be patient. Tonight we'll talk this all out."

Tucker scowled unhappily, pulled off his red beret and wiped his face then pulled the beret back on with a sharp tug. "Tonight then, make it early." and he stomped off catching up with the others.

***

The smell of sweet perfume and skin lotion told him he wasn't along. Abigail slipped her arm through his but he quickly shook her loose. "Don't you like me anymore?" she purred.

"We're not playing that game, Abby-- "

"Abigail!" she corrected.

"So what great and terrible problem do you have that just has to be discussed with me when I, so obviously, have not felt like talking to anyone today?"

"Oh, nothing. I'm just messing with Goth Girl."

"And every time you do that, Abby -- "

"Abigail!"

"Abby, you just piss me off that much more."

"Oh come on, you like it! Every time I get Little Miss "I'm so Emo" in a snit she gets closer to you. You like that don't you?"

"I don't like people who manipulate people that way."

"Like they way you dangled this ghost project in front of me just to get me to crack my old man's computer again? That's not manipulating?"

"No, that was --" Danny paused to think of how it was not like manipulating since Abigail was infuriating right about it. "It's more like bribery," he concluded, scowling at the lameness of that."

"Oh, Danny what is it with you?" she asked, grabbing hold of his arm again. "We had such a good time in DC. I could tell you liked me. Why are you being so difficult now?"

Abigail was wearing a wide brimmed straw hat which made it hard for Danny to look her in the eyes. She had pretty eyes, almost as pretty as Paulina's, the heart-throb for half the male students of Casper High, a perky up-tilted nose and a strong chin. Who could not fall for a face like that. But like Valerie Grey, another classmate from Casper High Danny had dated, Abigail was a ghost hunter. She would happily and enthusiastically hunt down and destroy Danny Phantom. Danny Fenton couldn't let that happen.

Besides, Sam Manson had her own dark attractions, had always been there for Danny and wasn't as demanding as, truth be told, Abigail was.

"I'm not being difficult," Danny denied. "I've just got a lot on my mind. I mean, we've put down this loose ghost but we still haven't stopped who ever created ghost computer viruses."

"And has nothing to do with how short a leash Goth Girl has you on."

"Sam doesn't have me on a leash."

So some reason Abigail found that funny and laughing, rejoined the others walking a block ahead of him.

They stopped for a red light and when it changed Danny found himself not alone, again.

"She's just messing with your mind," he said.

"I know," Sam replied.

"So is this some intricate counter-ploy to make her think she's got you running while you're plotting some scheme of your own?"

"What?" Sam asked, confused. "No I wanted to find out what's got you all so gloomy today. But every time I've tried to drop back and talk with you someone else had beaten me to it."

"I feel like Ann Landers! Everybody got a problem and I'm supposed to fix it. Altheria's mad at Sid but Sid doesn't understand why. Abigail doesn't understand why people don't like her. Tucker thinks T'Keisha is keeping a secret from him. And -- It's just too much. I couldn't sleep last night, that's why I'm down in the dumps."

"Because Altheria kissed you?"

"Did she tell?"

"How could she not. God, I wish I'd been there to see it. You falling off a wall to avoid getting kissed! I was in hysterics thinking about it."

"She had her mouth open. What's up with that?"

Sam stopped flat footed and stared at Danny for a moment before breaking out in laughter.

"What's so funny?" Danny demanded angrily.

"I have got to write that down and put it in with your baby pictures as the two most embarrassing moments in your life."

"It's not funny!"

Sam stopped laughing, cleared her throat and agreed. "It'll never be funny -- to you!" And started laughing again.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Sam finally apologized. "But after listening to you pine over Paulina all those times, hearing that you tried to avoid a hot kiss...What did you think you were going to do with her if Paulina ever had agreed to go out on a date with you?"

"I wasn't ready. She surprised me."

They walked in silence for a minute. From time to time Sam would switch bags from right hand to left as their weight pulled on her shoulders. Danny finally took one of the bags from her.

"So if it wasn't Altheria trying to plant a wet one on you," Sam said thoughtfully, "it must be some kind of secret that T'Keisha's keeping from Tucker?"

"There's no secret -- " Danny started to protest but let it fizzle out. Sam had figured it out. He hadn't mentioned why T'Keisha had wanted to talk to him, which meant that it had to be a secret.

"She knows," he said.

"Knows what?" Sam responded without thinking. "About you?" she added when what he's said sank in.

"Yeah." Danny whispered

"How? What gave you away?"

"Apparently the way I talk."

"You don't sound anything like yourself when you're Danny Phantom."

"I know. She said as much, but it's the words I use, the phrases. She -- You know she can't look at me when I'm a ghost -- so she was just listening to everything I said yesterday, when I took her into the Ghost Zone."

"And she figured it out from that?"

"I guess."

"She's smart. I knew there was a reason I liked her." After a moment. "Has she told Tucker -- no, of course not, that's why she looks like she's got a secret. But she told you?"

"Last night when I was flying her back to her house."

"What are you going to do?"

"Trust her, I guess. What else can I do?" Danny looked, hoping to see if Sam did have an idea. "Tucker, her and I are going for a walk tonight so we can talk about this. Do you want to come along?"

"Yes, but maybe I shouldn't. T'Keisha needs to talk to Tucker and Tucker needs to talk to you. I would kind of make this a crowd."

"You know, at one point I thought the idea of a parent-free weekend in Chicago hunting ghosts and messing about would be a barrel of fun," Danny said. "Right now I can't wait for this thing to be over."

"We still got to tomorrow before going back home on Sunday." Sam reminded him.

"Yeah, I keep wondering what else can go wrong."

***

The hardest part about the talk between Tucker, T'Keisha and Danny was getting out of the room without the rest of the gang following them. Down on the street they had trouble finding some place to walk to. The hotel and convention center was located in a largely industrial region. So they reversed course and found a quiet corner in the lounge. Once settled with chairs pulled close today Danny was at a lose what to say. He had practice this several times but when then moment actually came he just didn't know how to start.

T'Keisha finally broke the ice by telling Tucker "I know that Danny's a ghost."

"Half ghost," Danny corrected.

"You told her?" Tucker accused. "You never told anyone before!"

"I didn't, she figured it out."

Tucker turned to T'Keisha and asked, "How?" since to him Danny Phantom was so unlike Danny Fenton that he assumed no one would ever make the connection. So she explained. And that lead to further questions. Occasionally T'Keisha would ask the questions and Tucker or Danny would answer.

In time the conversation turned to other things, Danny's peculiar situation quickly forgotten. Suddenly it was 8 PM and time to T'Keisha to catch the train back home. Danny offered to fly her but she demurred. So they walked her to the station, and Tucker was already to accompany her on the train. She kissed instead and promised to see him in the morning. Walking back to the hotel all Tucker could talk about was how wonderful T'Keisha was.

Sam was waiting for them when they got back. All Danny could do was whisper that everything had gone well. The others were watching a monster marathon on TV. Danny surprised himself by not joining them. Bed and a long night's sleep sounded pretty good to him just then.


	10. Chapter 10

Viral Attack - Chapter 10 - Half Past My Last Nerve

Danny awoke to a hand nudging him. Tucker Foley was lying awkwardly close in their shared hotel bed, his face almost touching Danny's.

"Roll over," Tucker muttered, "your breath is like ice."

He was about to move when the meaning of Tucker's words struck him.

"Tuck!" he whispered back. "That was my ghost sense. There's a ghost around here somewhere. You're facing the room, what do you see?" Danny's ghost sense usually manifested itself as a wisp of fog but that fog was caused by his breath turning super-cold.

"I'm not wearing my glasses, man," Tucker whispered back. Still, he lifted his head slightly to see over Danny. "Technus-clone is coming out of something on the desk."

Danny swore under his breath.

"It seems to be looking for something," Tucker added. "It's moving to the bathroom."

"Good."

Danny rolled off the bed and felt around in the dark for one of the gym bags piled up- between the room's two beds. A gym bag filled with Fenton gear. He couldn't go ghost here, now, with so many people not in on his secret but the bag ought to have a blaster and a clone was weak enough to go down from one of those.

The ghost came out of the bathroom. Danny froze as it gave the room another glance, then it walked into the vestibule between the adjoining rooms.

"Find out where it came from," he whispered to Tucker and, pulling out the blaster, he leaped up and went after the spectral visitor.

The ghost had walked right through the closed door to the girl's room but fortunately the door hadn't been locked so Danny was able to ease it open without trouble.

The only light in the room was the super bright dial of the hotel's radio/alarm clock. But that was enough to show the Technus-clone holding the Fenton Thermos in its hands. It was fumbling around with the controls.

"Drop it!" Danny shouted, then fired the blaster as the clone turned on him, raising a glowing hand filled with ectoplasm.

The ghost disappeared with an audible "pop."

The Thermos fell to the floor with a thud.

Screams filled the room.

In later days Danny would insist that it was his sister who screamed the loudest but truthfully it was hard to tell.

He felt behind him for the light switch and flipped it on.

"What are you doing in here," his sister demanded once she could see again in the light, "and where are your clothes?"

"There was a ghost--" he began then remembered that he had been sleeping in his underpants. And that was still all he was wearing. Danny backed quickly towards the door.

"That's it!" Jazz shouted. "Everybody up! Five minutes! We're having a meeting to end this once and for all. And Danny -- put some clothes on!"

Danny ran into Tucker who had found his glasses and was holding one of the Fenton Finders. He was wearing his red beret and Buzz Lightyear underroos.

"Jazz is having a cow," Danny told him. "Get dressed, we're having some kind of meeting." He relayed the information to Sid, who was sitting on the side of his bed, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. He wasn't wearing any pants. That settled it for Danny. Henceforth he was sleeping in pajamas!

***

Danny pulled on his jeans and a Tee shirt then knocked on the girl's room's door. Jazz let him in. She was wearing last night's jeans and Tee. Her pretty red hair was in a jumble pulled back into a pony-tail.

Sam was sitting on her bed wearing black silk Chinese pajamas. It had gold buttons and red pipping. Altheria had on an oversized, orange Cook County Jail Tee shirt. She was sitting in the bed with the blankets pulled up to her waist. Without any of the rings and jewelry stuck in her face she had a plain, youthful look. As Danny sat down next to Sam, Abigail came out of the bathroom brushing her hair. She was wearing one of the hotel's courtesy robes, and from the way she was clutching it with her free hand, Danny suspected she didn't had anything on under it.

Tucker came in from the boy's room a minute later, still holding the Fenton Finder, though he had somehow gotten his pants and a Tee shirt on as well. Sid ambled in behind wearing just a raggety pair of cut-off jeans. He smiled at Jazz, who snapped. "Put a shirt on."

Jazz was sitting at the desk. She held some of the hotel's complimentary stationary on top of a copy of the hard-bound Hotel Services Guide. She was impatiently tapping a pen on its edge.

"Where's the ghost?" she asked once Sid got back with a shirt on.

"I'm here on the floor," Technus shouted from inside the Thermos. "Would one of your ever so nice children be a dear and pick me up?"

Danny picked up the Thermos and set it on the edge of the dresser.

"A-hem," the Thermos prompted. "Could you, perhaps, turn me over. I'm sitting on my head and I'm getting such a crick in my neck..."

"The other ghost," Jazz said. "The one that made you burst in on us in the middle of the night?"

"Destroyed." Danny said

"What time is it, anyway?" Tucker asked.

"Half past my last nerve!" Jazz snapped.

"Didn't know it was that late."

"Don't laugh, Danny. You said you had this all fixed. Everything was under control. And here you are shooting ghosts in our room in the middle of the night! I've had it with you."

"I didn't set it loose."

"No of course you didn't." Jazz was suddenly calm again. "So where did this ghost come from?"

"Ask him," Danny said pointing to the Thermos.

"What?" Technus squawked from inside the Thermos. "How could I do anything. I was inside this infernal device all the time."

"You hid a Technus-clone somewhere the other night when you were supposed to be shutting them down."

"Oh, that. What did you expect. It's in my nature. I'm a villain, it's what we do."

"Where was it, Tuck?"

"Inside the Fenton Finder that we used to sweep the area for left-over ghosts. Naturally it didn't pick up the ghost inside it."

"Are they any others?"

"I used this Spectro-analyzer we didn't take to T'Keisha's town to check the rest of our gear. The rest of the stuff in our room is clean but I'm picking up two more latent ghosts here in this room. One looks to be in Sam's cell phone and the other -- I'm having trouble locating. It's like it's in Altheria but how's that possible?"

Altheria blushed. Sam had dug out her cell phone and tossed it to Danny, who shot it with the blaster. He handed it then to Tucker who waved the Spectro-analyzer over it and pronounced it clean. "But I'm still getting something from Altheria. Could it be in one of her piercings?"

"Is it here?" Altheria asked, pointing to the meaty part of the back of her neck. Tucker ran the analyzer over the place she pointed to and nodded.

"My mom had me chipped back when I was twelve. I'd started running away then and she thought this would be one way to track me down."

"You have a radio chip implanted in your neck?" Abigail asked, appalled. "I thought the old fart was crazy but that takes the cake! Of course if he wanted to chip me he would have done it while I was asleep so I wouldn't know anything about it. Does that gizmo find radio chips as well as ghosts?"

"Can you zap it with the blaster?" Sam asked.

"Not without hurting Altheria. Later, when I can get hold of Danny Phantom he can remove the chip. For now we're going to have to hope it won't come out on its own." As a ghost Danny Phantom could make his hand immaterial and reach inside Altheria's body and grasp the radio chip and pull it out. The evil Dark Dan had done something like to Danny to keep Danny in the future while Dark Dan tried to kill his friends and family.

"Geez," Altheria forced a hollow laugh. "My mom always said I was a ticking time-bomb. Who knew I'd literally become one."

"Don't worry, we'll take care of it," Sam assured.

Danny turned to the Fenron Thermos, "Are you in contact with the clones or were they timed to emerge."

"I don't know what you mean," Technus blustered.

Jazz hopped up and grabbed the Thermos, shook it ruthlessly for a minute before slamming it back down on the dresser-top. "You know what we mean!" she snarled.

"Are you in contact with these clones?" Danny repeated in a quiet voice.

"Oh, I know this game," Technus said. " 'Good cop -- Bad cop'. You ask questions and if I don't answer you threaten to give me back to your sister. What a clever boy. -- I'm not playing! -- Do your worst. There's nothing you can do to me while I'm inside your infernal little -- and the emphasis is on little -- prison that I fear!"

"I'm sorry. You thought Jazz was the bad cop? She's just cranky because you interrupted her beauty sleep. No, the bad cop is our dad. You remember him?

"Big guy, kind of dopey, has horrible taste in clothes?"

"That's him. Do you know what his biggest wish is in the whole wide world?

"Cheap Internet service?"

"No."

"Peace and love?"

"No.

"Fudge. That's it, a lifetime supply of hot fudge."

"Close, but -- no. Dad's biggest wish in the whole world would be to dissect a ghost. Would you like to be that ghost?"

"Whoa, what a minute, kid, that's a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions!"

"The Ghost Zone is not a signatory to the Conventions."

"Cruelty to animals?"

"You're not really an animal, are you?"

"We had a deal you ungrateful whelp! A deal! I helped you and now you're threatening me with vivisection? Where's your honor? Your decency? What about our deal?"

"Jazz, you want to do the honors?" Danny asked.

"You wouldn't really given him to your father, would you?" Sam asked.

Danny put a finger to his lips, telling her to quiet.

"Listen to the nice girl." Technus pleaded.

Jazz picked up the Thermos and got ready to shake it up again.

"I'll talk! I'll talk!" Technus cried.

Jazz put the Thermos back down.

"Are you in contact with the clones?"

"No. If I could reach anything outside of this Thermos I would have controlled the Thermos before this."

"When's the clone inside Altheria supposed to come out?"

"The pin-cushion girl? A couple more days."

"Who made the clones -- the original ones you shut down?"

"How would I know. I certainly didn't."

"When you took them over you must have read their programming, or whatever," Danny insisted. "You must have been able to tell where they came from and who they are since you keep saying that they're weren't you."

"But they are me."

"You said they weren't."

"That was before I absorbed them. They're some sort of horrid copy of me from a long time ago."

"Who created them?"

"Beaucoup Bucks,"

"We know that, but that's not his real name. What's his real name?"

"Look, kid, have pity on me," Technus said from inside the Thermos. Then he screamed: "I don't know! I never saw these clones before. All they know is this Beaucoup Bucks. I don't know any more than they do. Please don't give me to your father. We had a deal. A deal I tell you. You've got to set me free!"

"What a wuss." Altheria sniped. Danny scowled at her, hoping she would shut up.

"What about you," Danny asked. "Someone must have made a copy of you a long time ago, surely you recall someone trying to do something like that?"

"Technus lives for the Now, the past is so much -- old stuff."

"Think harder. Maybe Dad can help you unlock your memories...."

Sam was mouthing Danny's name and shaking her. He guessed that she didn't like his approach to questioning. He wasn't happy about it either. It was hard trying to maintain a hardboiled persona.

"Wait! I'm remembering something. Some old guy in a white coat, like a doctor, or maybe a teacher.. He was trying to become a master of technology but I told him to beat it, that gig was taken."

"Did he have a camera or something like a camera?"

"Maybe. I don't know. The memory is gone."

"Maybe if we shook him up some more it will shake another memory loose," Sid suggested.

"Nah," Danny shook his head. "I think that is all he remembers. He's not a very good ghost..."

"I'm right here!" Technus complained.

"Besides I think we know who it was."

"Beaucoup Bucks?" Jazz asked.

"No, that's just a pseudonym he used,. I'm thinking it was Beauregard C. Buchwald."

"Who's Beauregard C. Buckwald,"

"Well, he this dead guy...." Abigail started to explain

"Stop. Stop right there." Jazz was holding her hands up dramatically. "This isn't going to work with everyone just jumping in. Let's start from the beginning and work our away forward methodically. In my experience counseling that is always the best way to go."

Danny worked hard to keep from coughing at that. Jazz's experience "counseling" amounted to one or two group therapy sessions, one of which had gotten wildly out of control.

"So how did this all get started?"

"Can't we put this off this morning when T'Keisha gets here and can tell her parts of the story?" Tucker suggested.

"No! We're staying here until we get this ghost thing taken care of. You say it was taken care of the night before last but here we are with ghosts sneaking into my bedroom. I won't stand for it, I won't."

" 'Your' bedroom?' " Altheria muttered with a rolling of the eyes.

"Whatever. You say this thing is like a computer virus, right? But instead of messing with your computer it spawns these ghosts." she asked.

"Yeah," Tucker answered. "It started with T'Keisha. She opened an email she thought I'd sent her and this Technus clone came out and started attacking her. She disabled it by busting her computer. We flew down --"

"In the Specter Speeder?"

"Yeah, anyway, when we got there another Technus clone attacked us. We destroyed it and thought that was that. Only we'd forgotten about the first clone who had been hiding untill this weel."

"But where did the infection come from?" Jazz asked, staring at Altheria who was absent-mindedly twisting a complicated shaped metal piece through one of the hole in her earlobe.

"T'Keisha said the email came from me, only I never sent her that message," Tucker added.

"Mine was, like, from Altheria," Sid said.

"While I can't be sure," Altheria said, "I don't recall sending Sid anything for a few days so I'm doubtful that it really was me. Who else was attacked? I remember someone else saying they'd been attacked.

"That would be me," Abigail spoke up. "It said it was from Danny but He'd just le--" she paused at Danny's sudden glare and hastily edited what she had been about to say. "I knew that he wasn't on-line at the time."

"So there were three ghost attacks from three different e-mails sent from three different computers. What does that tell us?" Jazz summarized.

No one had an idea.

"All three of you claim you did not send the e-mails," Jazz was looking at the group speculatively. "How can you send E-mail and not be aware of it? Tucker?"

Danny nearly snorted the pop he was drinking. He recognized how Jazz would ask questions then put someone on the spot to answer them.

"Well...It depends on the virus and the operating system you're using, Some viruses will open your mail program and copy itself to everyone on your address list and mail out a copy. I suppose one could make a virus that's more selective about who it mails out a copy to."

"So who has T'Keisha's E-mail address on their computer?" Jazz asked. Tucker immediately raised his hand. No one else did. After a moment Tucker said, "Come on, Danny, you've got her address, too?"

"I do?"

"Remember when I sent you those cheat codes for Killersaur 5000? I forwarded them from T'Keisha."

"I didn't know that."

"So we have Tucker and Danny for T'Keisha. Who has Sid on their E-mail lists?"

Altheria and Danny raised their hands.

"And Abigail?"

Danny felt very conspicuous being the only one to raise his hand.

"I'm sensing a pattern here," Jazz said.

"What?" Danny protested, "You think my computer is infected?"

"It's nothing to be ashamed of, it happens to the best of us," Tucker cracked.

"But, but, but. I've got the best anti-virus programs known to man -- and Dad's ectoplasm filters as well. Nothing could get on my computer!"

"Face it, Danny, you're our prime suspect." Altheria said.

"Why me? How could my computer get infected?" Danny was outraged as the accusation even though he know, intellectually, that getting a virus on one's computer was commonplace. "T'Keisha's E-mail was initiated in the Ghost Zone," Tucker interrupted. "It's all there in the routing information. It came from some kind of a relay within the Ghost Zone but I didn't know that one could send Email through a Portal."

"Buckwald's Ghost Zone Radio could," Abigail spoke up. "At least that was his claim. I'm sure if he could pick up radio waves from the Ghost Zone he could convert them to digital signals."

"Wait a minute, who's Buchwald," Jazz asked. "What happened to Beaucoup Bucks? I thought you said Beaucoup Bucks sent those E-mails?"

"See, that's the whole thing," Tucker tried to explain. "The E-mails that had the Technus virus were all sent from someone calling themselves "Beaucoup Bucks" but Abigail, here, says, Beaucoup Bucks was just a joke name some guy called Buchwald liked to use."

"And he was always pushing his invention of a Ghost Zone Radio. Said he could pick up communications from the other side." Abigail added.

Jazz looked hard at Abigail. "Do I know you," she asked.

"Abigail Farley-Smythe-Hyde," Danny explained, "We were at camp together. Her father's a Guy in White."

"Her father's a Guy in White -- and you invited her here?" Jazz was aghast.

"Jazz, you met her at Camp, and again two days ago when we arrived."

"I thought she was part of the crowd that was going to disappear after that night." Jazz continued to look at Abigail as if she had never seen her before.

"Ok. Jazz. After we had searched the Internet and even Dad's personal files on the Fenton Mainframe and came up with nothing about Beaucoup Bucks I decided to try one last place," Danny couldn't look at Sam as he said this. Sam was sitting stony faced. "So I called Abigail to see if she could find anything on her father's computer."

"From which she was thoroughly grounded, as I recall," Sam butted in.

"He changed his pass-word but it wasn't hard to guess. I can't help it if he's stupid with passwords.

"We never got that far because I had heard of Beaucoup Bucks. My Dad loved to tell stories about ther crackpots who would come in and try to pawn off on the government some crazy invention of theirs. One of those crackpots was Beaucoup Bucks, only that wasn't his real name. It was Beauregard C. Buchwald, a retired professor. Everyone called him 'Beaucoup Bucks' because he was always telling them how he was going to make beaucoups bucks -- beaucoup is Cajun for 'a lot' -- from all his inventions."

"Did this Buchwald person ever bring in any of his inventions?" Jazz asked.

"Dad did talk about Buchwald's Ghost Zone Radio, which he said never worked."

"Go on," Jazz encouraged.

"Not that I ever saw it, this was just the old man talking. He said it was the size of a microwave with a doughnut on top. He would plug it in and invite people to listen through a pair of headphones. Most of the time people only heard static but occasionally there would be what sounded like a word or maybe even a phrase. But no one was ever convinced that what they were hearing was voices from the other side."

"That's it?" Jazz asked.

"Well they did give him money, I found out later, when I looked him up in the computer system. Someone higher up in the bureaucracy must have believed him because they insisted that he be given contracts to improve his machine. They were several follow up reports but none ever said that his device ever worked any better. And then he died. And a year later published an article in the International Review of Spectral Manifestations."

"After he died?" Jazz asked, puzzled.

"Danny caught that after I'd E-mailed him a bunch of papers about Buchwald. He was an old man who, I guess, everyone just figured he'd die eventually so they didn't pay any special attention when he did. Danny, I guess, was sorting the papers chronologically, when he noticed that Buchwald's last paper came after his obituary."

"I - uh - called the editors of IRSM and they confirmed that the paper was submitted for review six weeks after Buchwald's reported death. They hadn't heard that he had died at all."

"Are you saying that Buchwald's GHOST submitted that paper?" Altheria asked.

"It sure looks like it." Tucker answered for Danny who had become absorbed about something else."

"You hadn't mentioned the story about the Ghost Radio before," he asked Abigail.

"I hadn't? Sorry."

"You just said everyone knew Buchwald as Beaucoup Bucks."

"Yeah, they did."

"Was that 'doughnut' on the Ghost Radio really round or could it have been six or eight sided?"

"I never saw it. This was my dad's story. Does it matter?"

That was the million dollar question, thought Danny. While Sam and Tucker knew that his parents had worked on a prototype Ghost Portal back when they were in college, they didn't know that the device wasn't the full size Portal the Fenton's had in the basement of FentonWorks but a smaller desktop size model with a roundish frame around the portal. The portal had malfunctioned the one time they tried it, exploding into the face of their friend and colleague, Vlad Master, the second wealthiest man in the world today, but then just as much a humble student of Spectral Physics as Danny's parents were. Vlad Master was infected with a virulent form of Ecto-Acne that took years to clear up. What only Sam, Tucker and Danny knew was that the accident, like Danny's accident twenty years later, had turned Vlad Masters into Vlad Plasmeus, a half-man, half-ghost monster, bent on world domination. Danny had traveled back in time courtesy of Clockwork, the Ghost Master of Time, in order to prevent that accident. Danny had learned the hard way that Destiny could not be easily changed. But that wasn't the point. Danny realized that Abigail's tale of the Ghost Zone Radio sounded a lot like that first proto-type ghost portal. Was Beaurgard C. Buchwald someone his mother and father knew?

For an instant he had a vision of what the connection must be. It was a clear as a map. Then someone spoke his name and the vivid map turned into so many sparrows fleeing at the approach of a cat. He tried to recover the thought but it was gone. Utterly and totally gone.

"What?" he asked, looking up.

"Jazz was asking if you had found any physical evidence of Buchwald's existence -- an address, or telephone number, E-mail account, stuff like that," Tucker explained. "It seems to me that if this Ghost Zone Radio exists then it could be the relay from the Ghost Zone for this Zombie-bot viruses."

"And if we could destroy the Radio then we've eliminated the menace." Altheria put in with a grunt. Sid had fallen asleep and toppled over onto her. Or maybe he had intended to do that all along. She pushed at his heavy body, finally whacking it with her elbow, waking Sid. He sat up with a jerk and immediately slide off the edge of the bed. He hit the floor with a thud and a round of laughter from the others.

"Yeah, said Danny, thinking about the plan. "I think it would work. So where's the Ghost Zone Radio?"

"We don't know. It's beginning to look like Buchwald doesn't exist either," Abigail put in. She had pulled out her laptop by now and was studying something it was displaying.

"What do you mean? Your father met the man. How can you say he doesn't exist?" Danny demanded, suddenly dismayed that what had promised to be a quick end to this problem was just getting worse.

"After Tucker mentioned that this Ghost Zone Radio must be the relay letting in these ghosts I tried to find where Buchwald might have lived because he would have had to leave the relay somewhere," Abigail said. "So I when back over all his correspondence with the Guys in White. No addresses, no telephone numbers. Just his E-Mail address and his in-person visits. Even his obituary didn't given an address, not even a city where he lived.

"So I logged into the Social Security Death Notices index. There was nothing there. Even after I widen the search by a couple years either side of his obit. So I tried Lexus-Nexus. Again nothing."

"What's Lexus-Nexus? Sounds like a car." Sid asked, trying to blink away his sleepiness.

"It's an index of newspaper articles," Abigail explained. "You have to be a member to use but it gives pretty complete coverage. The Guys In White have a blanket membership so I could slip in under my old man's account and run a check."

"Wouldn't you get in trouble doing stuff like that," Sam asked mischievously.

Abigail shrugged, then grabbed for her robe which had started to slip when she'd taken her hands off it. "He'll never notice my use of Lexus-Nexus. Nobody ever checks on the usage. It's like with credit cards, no one ever looks at the bill, they just pay the amount due.

"Don't count on that." Sid muttered with what appeared to be guilty knowledge.

"A--hem!" Jazz coughed, getting everyone's attention. "Let's not get distracted, ok? So you're saying," she directed to Abigail, "that in none of the places you've checked was there any record of a Beauregard C. Buchwald. Or for a Beaucoup Bucks?"

"Yes, ma'am." Abigail replied. Danny didn't recall Abigail calling anyone 'ma'am' before. He was impressed -- with his sister!

"So -- Beaucoup Bucks, who sent out these E-mails ghost viruses, doesn't exist. He's really Beauregard C. Buchwald -- who also doesn't exist! Someone is sending out these E-mails. Who? Any ideas -- Danny?"

And Danny was on the spot. "It looks like we're dealing with someone who likes to play name game," he suggested.

"Obviously," Jazz sneered but Tucker had a thought:

"What about those ATM receipts T'Keisha mentioned," he said. Every one of them ended with a name -- "u-b-h-q-v-a-v." Maybe there's a clue there.

"What kind of a name is 'ub-quav'?" Altheria asked.

Tucker explained about the receipts -- the lotto numbers, the stock market tips and all.

Abigail asked Tucker to repeat the letters again and typed them into her laptop.

"It's not an anagram," Sam said. "Too many weird consonants, not enough vowels. Tucker and T'Keisha think it's some kind of cipher but none of their programs have been able to crack it."

"It's probably something so simple that you've overlooked it because it's too simple," Abigail said.

"Exactly!" Tucker explained, "and it's driving me mad because I can't think of any encrypting programs we haven't tried."

"What is the simplest encrypting technique?" Abigail mused to no one in particular as she typed furiously on her laptop. She looked up, waiting for an answer from Tucker."

"Pig Latin?" Sid suggested. "Nix-nay on the ig-pay atin-lay. Right?"

"That only works on sentences." Altheria sniped. "Upid-stay."

"I think Sid may ne on to something," Abigail said, drawing sharp claims of "No!" from Altheria, Danny and Jazz. Sam muttered, "of course."

"Look, pig latin is a form of letter substitution. You take the first letter of a word, move it to the back and add 'ay.' Letter substitution is the simplest form of encryption. Depending on the algorithm used for the substitution it can be easy or hard to crack."

"ROT-13" Tucker exclaimed. "This is in ROT-13 and we never noticed!" Tucker actually did slap himself on the forehead.

"What's ROT-13?" Danny asked.

"Rotation-13," Tucker told him. "You replace each letter with the letter 13 spaces away. 'A' becomes 'm', 'b' becomes 'n' and so. Since the alphabet is 26 characters long, ROT-13 swaps all letters with other letters without need for blanks for fillers." He turned to Abigail, "So what is u-b-h-whatever?"

"Houdini."

"Houdini" Tucker and Danny said together.

"What does Houdini have to do with electronic ghosts?"

Abigail smiled smugly. "Already thought of that. From Wikipedia it says that later in life Houdini became involved in spiritualism, debunking fake mediums by exposing the tricks they used to produce ghostly activity during seances. But Houdini apparently wasn't an agnostic about the afterlife since he promised his wife that if there was an afterlife he would try to get in touch with her, and left a secret word only she would know to prove that it was he and not some faker."

"You think 'ub-qav' was houdini's secret word?" Sid asked.

"No! well it could be, no one knows what the secret word Houdini told his wife was," Abigail said. "It could have been 'u-b-h-q-v-a-v,' it could have been 'rosebud.' It could have been anything. I think the point is that he's saying 'I'm calling from the other side.' Don't you think so, Danny?" Abigail flashed him a smile.

"So what," Sam snapped, her arms crossed in disgust over her chest. "Beaucoup Bucks as a joke name. Beauregard C. Buchwald was a fake name. Knowing that the inventor of the viral ghosts is sending them from the other side doesn't tell one damn thing about him."

Danny noticed that everyone seemed to be looking at him, rather than Abigail, whom Sam had been lambasting. Were they expecting him to have an answer to that? He shrugged his shoulders because he really didn't have an answer.

"If this Houdini guy is dead," Sid suggested, "not the magician but the guy behinds these ghosts, isn't that some kind of a clue?"

"Clue about what?" Danny snapped sarcastically as Sid suggested just seemed to be going over the obvious all over again.

"Somebody had to die. How many people could have invented a Ghost Radio?"

Danny was about to say something, then stopped, closed his mouth and thought.

"You think Sid is right," Altheria asked incredulously.

"He has a point. We're not going to find out who's responsible by chasing after Beaucoup Bucks or Buchwald or whoever. We're going to have to figure out who could have done this and run each one down to earth."

"That could take forever, man," Tucker protested.

"Maybe not. How many people could invent a ghost radio? Not many. We just have to make up a list of them then find out which ones have died recently.

"Where are we going to get a list like that?" Tucker persisted.

"Mom and Dad." Jazz answered for Danny.

"Exactly. They know everybody who's involved with ghost research."

"How are you planning to ask them," Abigail wondered. "I'd love to see that. I ask purely from a professional point of view since asking my Dad anything about his work has failed."

"It's not getting Mr. Fenton started," Tucker cracked, "It's getting him to stop."

"Are we done yet," Danny asked. "It's settled that we're going to have to talk to our folks about who could be Beaucoup Bucks. The Technus-clones have been stomped out except for the one in Altheria's chip and we'll take care of that later. We have Technus on ice. I think we can all go back to sleep, Jazz."

Jazz was still writing furiously on the borrowed hotel stationary.

She looked up and pointed to the Fenton Thermos. "Take that with you," she barked and went back to writing her notes.

Sid lumbered to his feet and tried to give Altheria a quick kiss, which she dodged by pulling the blankets up around her. Abigail folded up her laptop and set it down but remained sitting on the edge of the bed holding on to her robe. Sam had been sitting on top the cover so she got up to fold them down. As she passed Danny she said, "she's not the only one who would like to be there when you ask your father that. Then again I like your father." She smiled and slipped in beside Altheria.

Back in their room Sid stretched out on his bed without undressing and was snoring in seconds. Danny and Tucker lay in their bed staring at the ceiling for a bit.

"Do you really think your father knows who Beaucoup Bucks is?" Tucker asked,

"The more I think about it, the more I think he does. Of course not as Beaucoup Bucks, Beauregard C. Buchwald or any other names we know him by. Remember what Technus said: the guy that tried to take his picture or scan him or whatever it was he did, he looked like a teacher. A professor of ghost science who's died within the last five years. I'm sure Dad knows someone like that."

"And if we close off his Ghost Zone Radio, will that really stop the ghost invasion?"

"It would be nice to have an anti-ghost computer virus program just to be sure, but yeah, I think so. At least until the next ghost figure out how to get into our world and tries to take it over."

"Lovely," Tucker sighed. "Is this how the rest of our lives going to be?"

"If there's one thing I've learned from Clockwork, it's that it's better not to know what the future contains."

"You got that right," Tucker said, rolling over. Danny rolled over, too, then opened his eyes and found them staring into Tucker's. "Oops" he muttered and rolled over facing out from the bed. As he hovered at the edge of the queen size bed Danny wondered if girls -- Sam -- had trouble sleeping two to a bed.

***

When T'Keisha arrived in the mid-morning no one felt like getting up. Jazz's mid-night session had left everyone tired, cranky and sleepy. No one felt much like doing anything.

"What about the hotel's pool?" Jazz suggested. Of course she and Sid had bought swimming suits the night they arrived. The others hadn't and didn't want to spent the little remaining of money on cloths they wouldn't need once they got home.

Still Danny kind of liked the idea since it didn't involve a lot of walking. "It could be fun,"he said. "I'll pick up a suit for you, Sam."

"No way, Danny!" Sam cried. "You are not going to buy any bathing suits for me!"

"Why not?"

"You have bad taste, If I let you pick out a bathing suit you'd end up picking out something that would make a porn star blush."

"I would not!" Danny protested. "I would never pick out anything that would embarrass you!"

"You don't know what would embarrass me."

"Sure I do."

"Hey I want in on this," Altheria broke it. "Twenty bucks says Danny can find a suit you'd like."

"What!" Sam cried, "I thought you were my friend? How could you do something like that."

"What? Making a bet? It's not like we'll force you to wear whatever Danny picks out. Come on, be a sport." Altheria laughed,

"I don't intend to be the butt of your jokes," Sam said, pushing past the punk girl.

"What's going on?" Jazz asked, while filling a handbag with an assortment of pencils, notepads, maps, medicine and so on.

"We're having a bet," Altheria began.

"We are not," Sam rejoined.

"Sam says Danny can't pick out a nice bathing suit. I've got twenty bucks that says Danny can," Altheria finished.

Jazz laughed. "I'm in. I say Danny can't."

"You're not helping," Sam scowled at Jazz.

"What do you mean?" Jazz asked, "I agree with you, Danny doesn't have any clothes sense. Look at what he wears -- all the time!"

"I don't care to be the subject of anyone's bet."

"Bet?" Sid asked as he came into the girl's room. "What are we betting on?"

"We're not!" Sam declared. "You have been sadly misinformed." Unfortunately Altheria had Sid's other ear and was explaining the nature of the bet. Sid pulled out his wallet and withdrew a twenty dollar bill. "I'm in."

"For or against?"

"For, of course, Danny's got good taste."

"Think you could pick out a good suit for me?" Altheria teased.

Sid blushed. "Nah, I'm not good with clothes."

"Geez!" Sam started pushing her way out of the room. "Next you'll be asking the bimbo!" she declared.

"Ask me what?" Abigail asked from the window where she had been watching the sun rising over the dimly seen Lake Michigan.

"Nothing! No body wants your opinion."

"You realize, Sam," Altheria called out as Sam was pulling the door to the hallway open. "It doesn't matter if you're there or not. We'll just decide by vote whether the suit is a winner or not."

Sam slammed the door as she left.

"Ask me what?" Abigail asked again.

"Whether Danny can pick out a swim suit that Sam would like." Altheria explained. "You in?"

"Forget Sam, I can pick out a suit that Danny would definitely like?"

"Electrician's tapes does not count as a bathing suit," Altheria returned. "I remember the suits you brought to Camp."

Abigail stuck out her tongue at Altheria. "It's a mug's game," she declared. "Sa-MAN-tha Manson will never accept anything Danny picks out.."

"So, twenty bucks against?" Altheria asked. "OK, who's left?"

"Tucker and T'Keisha" Danny said.

"Left for what?" Tucker asked as he came into the girl's room. "What was Sam in such a snit about."

"I offered to buy her a bathing suit and she said anything I'd pick out would embarrass her."

Tucker broke out in a fit of laughter. "She's got that right."

"Oh, come on, Tucker, I've got taste."

"Danny, have you ever looked at your wardrobe?"

"Why do people keep saying that?" Danny complained.

"I think Danny could pick out a nice swim suit," T'Keisha suggested.

"Girl, you don't know Danny as long as I have."

"I think I've known him long enough." T'Keisha crossed her arms. Tucker, recognizing the gesture from when his mother was POed at him, closed his mouth.

"So who's going to put some money down on this?" Altheria asked? She put a twenty on top the twenty Sid had dropped on the bed. Jazz and Abigail threw in twenty each. T'Keisha shook her head, "Daddy's opposed to gambling." Tucker breathed a sigh of relief since he didn't have an extra twenty bucks on him.

"So, two for and two against. Fenton, you've got a job set out for ya."Altheria headed towards the door, pushing Danny ahead of her.

"You know, I don't want to get Sam mad. I think we ought to call the whole thing off. Shee seemed pretty angry."

"Danny, this is the most fun we've had this weekend," Altheria declared. "You can't back out now."

With a sigh he let them push him around.

***

They passed Sam in the coffee shop having a bagel and orange juice. The others pushed Danny into the Gift Shop and herded him into the corner where the bathing suits were displayed. With six pairs of eyes hanging over his shoulders Danny felt very uncomfortable, like the times his mother had asked him to fold laundry and there was some of hers in the basket. Finally he had to tell them to back off so he could choose in solitude. There were numerous two piece outfits, some so small Danny wondered who in their right mind would wear them. There were a smaller selection of one-piece suits that he knew Sam favored, and another section of almost dowdy suits with skirts that he imagined were for grandmothers.

Now that people were betting on him this whole idea seemed a lot less fun than it did originally. He had just wanted to do something nice for Sam. For being Sam. And now....

Danny shuffled along the racks of suits. Some were too large, or too small. Too bright, too drab. What if he couldn't find a nice suit for Sam? That might actually be a solution. If HE couldn't find a suit that he thought that Sam would like then there was no question of whether Sam would like it. The whole question would be moot.

Then he saw it. It wasn't black but a bluish indigo. Parts of it shimmered rainbowy, like oil on water. The legs were cut kind of high but the top ran all the way to the neck. Seams ran cross the front to make it look like a bustier but it was all very discrete. You had to be looking for it to see the stitching. There are times when you know that you have found exactly what you've been looking for, even when you never knew what it was you were looking for. Danny picked up the suit and joined his friends.

Altheria went to bring Sam back. She took one look at the suit and stalked off.

"Fork it over," Jazz demanded, holding out her hand, "Sam obviously did not like it."

"Not so fast," Sid interrupted, "The law they say 'silence means consent'. Since Sam didn't say anything we have to assume she likes it."

"When did you ever learn anything about the law," Altheria demanded.

Sid whispered embarrassingly "Juvie." After a moment he added, "Never trust your buds to back up your alibi when there's serious jail time involved."

Abigail snagged the money out of Sid's hand. "I think I called it correctly," she declared. "I said Miz Manson would never admit to liking anything Danny picked out, and she didn't. Now if you don't mind, I've got a bathing suit to buy with my winnings."

"The electrical tape is over here!" Altheria called to her.

***

Danny slipped between the others and made his way outside. He found Sam around the corner, leaning against a pylon ringing the parking lot.

"I'm really sorry, Sam" Danny began. "I just wanted to do something nice for you. I didn't know it was going to turn into a circus. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

"I could listen to your apologizes all day," Sam said with a sly smile. "It's OK. I'm not mad."

"You're not?"

"I was earlier. Look, I don't like to be the butt of anyone's joke and when this turned into a contest over whether you could pick out a nice outfit, that's when it stopped being funny. So the next time I ask you to stop, just stop, OK? I don't try to tell you what to do--"

"Sam, you do that all the time," Danny protested.

"No, I advice you not to do what you're thinking of doing but I don't tell you not to do it."

"I'm pretty sure what you tell me is not to do something. not that it's unwise." Danny persisted. "But I get it, I don't try to force you to do something you don't like."

"Something like that."

"But did you like the suit? You didn't say one way or the other in the store."

"And I never will. They will argue about whatever suit you picked out for the rest of the weekend. By not giving them the satisfaction of an answer they can't talk about me! They can only talk about you or the suit, and they will, but they can't talk about me."

"But you can tell me. I am pretty good about keeping secrets, after all."

"Are you kidding? You've told me so many embarrassing things about Tucker that if he knew, he'd never speak to you again!"

"But, they were so funny!"

"Well, yeah, but still you shouldn't have told me all of them."

"I just wanted to do you a favor you know." Danny said after a moment, quietly.

"I know. And I'm touched, but seriously, Danny, what do you see here?" Sam had pulled out her wallet and flipped through cardholder tabs.

"Uh -- credit cards?"

"And how many do you have in your pocketbook?"

"One."

"Danny, I can afford to buy any bathing suit here."

Danny was too embarrassed to comment. Sam rarely flouted her parent's wealth. She'd hidden it from he and Tucker for months after they'd met the first day of High School. She was the goofy Goth girl no one wanted to hang out with. Danny and Tucker were nerdy outsiders no one wanted to hang out with. So they had started hanging out together. And from there had grown into real friends.

"If you want to do something nice for a friends, you could slip Tuck fifty bucks so he can buy a suit for T'Keisha." Sam suggested.

"I thought we weren't going swimming?" Danny asked puzzled.

"It's going to be a long day. I want to go exploring in the morning. When we get tired of that and come back to the hotel, then swimming will sound like a good idea."

Danny colored slightly. "I don't have that much cash left over."

Sam pulled out her wallet again, extracted a bill and handed it to Danny. "And now you do."

"How much do you have in there?" Danny asked since her wallet seemed rather thich with green. More money than he had ever seen.

"It's not a competition," Sam snapped, slipping her wallet back into her pants.

"I can't take your money."

"It's not for you. It's for Tucker -- if he needs it.

"I'll pay you back."

"It's for Tucker, don't bother."

"Well, thanks. You know, I think I know exactly which bathing suit Tuck will pick out for T'Keisha."

"You think?

"Yes. I'm known Tucker most of my life. I think I know what he'll pick out."

"Is this a bet?"

"Yes -- no -- I thought you didn't like betting?"

"I don't mind making bets on other people. I just don't like bets being placed on me."

"So -- this fifty is on what Tuck picks out?"

"Oh, I'm thinking of something much more serious."

"Serious?" Danny repeated.

"If you're wrong you have to take me to a movie of my choosing."

"We go to movies all the time."

"We go to movies that we all agree on. I'm saying a movie I want to see."

"A chick flick?" Danny gulped.

"Could be."

"And if I'd right you go to the move I want to see?"

"Sure, why not."

Danny paused for a moment, confused. It sounded like he'd just made a "date" date with Sam. How did that happen?

"Ok, when I was going through the racks I saw a suit that I thought was perfect for T'Keisha. It was a leopard print that looked really nice and the middle was just this mesh fabric so it looks like a bikini but it's really a one-piece. When I saw it I thought that with a necklace of fangs and a six foot spear she'd give Raquel Welch a run for it as The Cave Girl babe -- what are you laughing at?"

It took Sam a moment to control her laughter. "That is so hilarious," she said almost breaking into laughter again. "That is exactly the same outfit I was thinking about. It's perfect for T'Keisha. But lose the bone necklace, that is too stereotypical.

"So did we both just win the bet, or lose?"

"Tucker still has to buy it, but that we were both thinking of the same suit -- that is outrageous."

After a bit Sam suggested they go back in and collect the others if they wanted to explore the city any that day. The first person the met coming into the hotel lobby was Tucker. He held up a package and said, "Look what I got T'Keisha!" He pulled out a bit of a leopard print bathing suit. For some reason the sight of it sent Danny and Sam into paroxysms of laughter.

***

Sam was able to drag the others outside, where the caught a bus taking them a couple miles north to Grant Park. This was an enormous park, like Central Park in New York, stretching from Michigan Ave to the lakefront. On the south end, were the Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Observatory. To the north were endless lawns, flower gardens, statues and fountains. All well designed and carefully attended.

They circled the Buckingham Fountain, made famous by that TV show, grabbed some hotdogs and ice cream bars and picnicked in the shade of some tall trees. Danny and Tucker told T'Keisha about the late night/early morning brain-storming session. "Of course!" T'Keisha exclaimed when they told her about Houdini's name being hidden by a ROT-13 cipher.

Afterwards they wander further north, finding a splash park for children between two glass towers onto which were projected pictures of people. The colossal images would wink, grimace and smile. Every so often they were purse their lips like they were about to spit and a huge jet of water would come out of their mouth. The children would go wild at that, trying to crowd into the stream. Further on was a fifty foot doughnut made of chrome steel, polished to a mirror finish. It was like a giant fun house mirror.

By then Jazz was getting hungry and from one of her tourist books found a restaurant that did deep-dish pizza. Stuffed and foot-sore they caught a bus back to their hotel. On the bus Sam threatened to buy Danny a pair of skimpy Speedos as punishment for that morning but relented in the gift shop and let him buy what he wanted. As if turned out Danny and Tucker bought the same color and model of baggy suits, leading Sid to called then the Bobbsey twins for the rest of the day. Sam picked out a shapeless black suit for herself. Danny had hoped she would pick the deep-blue suit he had selected then remembered that she wouldn't buy even if she did like it.

T'Keisha was stunning in the leopard print suit Tucker had bought her. It was obvious that the suit was cut for someone larger in the top and bottom then T'Keisha was but the design had lacings in the front at the top and on the sides of the hips that could be tightened and made the suit fit her well.

Abigail had found a tiny red bikini that flattered her red hair. From time to time she would tease Danny to give her swimming lessons since, has had been discovered at Camp, she wasn't a good swimmer. Danny declined, of course, but a couple of middle-aged businessmen were quick to offer their help. Even Abigail found that a little too creepy and soon retired to the hot tub with Jazz.

Danny had laid down on a lounge next to Sam meaning to catch his breath before diving in but kept slipping off to sleep so much that he was beginning to think he needn't have bought a suit at all. It was strange. He was close his eyes "only for a moment" and when he opened them again Sam was gone, out in the pool. His eyelids would slide back down -- only for a moment -- and Sam would be back on the lounge next to his. And a blink later Tucker might be in her seat, or T'Keisha. He had given up trying to stay awake when strong arms suddenly grabbed him up and throw him out into the pool. Danny came up sputtering to find Sid at the edge of the pool laughing. Danny lunged out of the water, grabbed Sid's elbow and pulled him in. It went downhill from there. But by the time Sid and Danny called a truce and climbed onto the edge of the pool Danny wasn't feeling sleepy a all.

***

Tucker tried talking T'Keisha into staying the night, their last night in Chicago, but really, all the beds in the girl's room were already taken. In the end the black girl took any early train home and Tucker went with her, to meet her parents. He got back late that night, admitting he'd missed one train because he had been too busy kissing T'Keisha!

They had decided it would be too much trouble for her to come up the next morning just to see them off.

It was just as well. Everyone woke up later, fought over their turns on the showers, fought over picking up the trash. Fought over who had brought what with them, who had bought what and more. By the time Jazz got them downstairs and turned in their room card passes the friends were a sullen group rather happy to be going their separate ways. Nonetheless there was a round-robin of phone calls that evening and a shared sense of sadness that their grand adventure was over.

With a delicate grinding of gears Jazz eased the ancient Chevette out of the parking lot and onto the highway. Danny was given the bag of quarters for the toll booth. Sam and Tucker linked up their Game Boys and began playing "Cheats" where the object was to beat their opponents through the way of various cheat codes.

"Next time," Jazz said as she forced the transmission into third gear and let the clutch out with a jerk, "You're driving!"


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11 - What's In A Name

It was late in the evening. Danny had napped a bit following the car trip home from Chicago. He was up now, taking it easy in the Fenton living room, reading the one of the comics he'd picked up at their fake comics convention. Dr. Peculiar, Ghost Annihilator. The Master of Mystic Energies ran around the world stopping ghost invasions. The first few years had been interesting when its creator, Moondog, was doing the book. Everyone assumed he had been whacked out on LSD all the time accounting for the book's surreal and imaginative content. Moondog disappeared one day, never to heard from again. Since then the comic had become bland, conventional, and, oddly, more successful.

Jack Fenton wandered in from the kitchen, holding a plate with a dish towel. From the aroma Danny assumed it was a pizza although most pizzas don't make a mound. His father sat down on the sofa near him, exhaled contentedly and tucked the dish towel into his orange jumpsuit under his chin. Balancing the plate on his ample chest he folded the pizza over like a taco and took a huge bite out of it. "Pizza's in the kitchen, Danny," he said through a mouthful of mozzarella.

"No thanks, Dad. We kind of lived on pizza at the -- uh -- convention. I don't think I could eat another bite." Which, oddly enough, was the truth.

Danny's mother came into the living room as well, holding a platter of vegetables -- broccoli flowerets, baby carrots, dip and some sliced apples and a dollop of peanut butter. Danny grabbed some carrots as she passed by. She put the platter down on an end table and took the seat beside it, found the remote and turned on the wall-sized television. She turned to the Discovery channel in hopes of Mythbusters blowing something up.

By leaning half-way out of his spot on the soda Danny could just reach the platter. He grabbed an apple slice and scrapped up some peanut butter.

"Ah, Doc Pec" Danny's father sighed, wiping his hands on the dish towel. The pizza had already disappeared. "That was my favorite comic when I was your age. I read it from the day it started."

"Uh, Dad, Dr. Peculiar started in 1962; you were born in 1965, right?"

"Yes, I was, April 12th, 1965!" Jack sighed contentedly.

"By the time you were born "Moondog" had already left the series and disappeared from off the face of the earth."

"Eh, what?" Danny's father looked confused.

Danny grabbed another slice of apple.

"If you were reading it when you were my age that would have been the Higgenbothen era, 1978 to 1983. The Necronomicon cycle."

"Higgenbothen? I but I recall the Moondog stories so vividly," Danny's father protested.

"That's because Professor Bushrod caught you reading an issue during his lecture," Danny's mother suggested.

"Issue three, 'Invasion of the Voids.' I paid twenty bucks for that issue and he burnt it. He burnt it in front of the whole class."

"After lecturing you for the rest of the hour about not wasting your time on trash."

"Twenty bucks is not trash."

"Number three was the scarce, censored issue. Too many people exploding in graphic detail." Danny said, "The publishers had to pull it off the newsstands."

"Exactly!" Jack Fenton asserted. "And he gave me 40 hours of detention -- which was spent cleaning up his lab, so that actually wasn't so bad."

"Professor Bushrod wouldn't let anyone into his lab," Danny's mother explained. "He was rather paranoid about people stealing his inventions. Then he went and had Jack clean up his top secret, private lab -- and never hung around to see what Jack was doing?"

"What was Jack -- er, Dad -- doing?"

"Snuck your mother and Vladie in, that's what! Oh we had so much fun looking at what he was doing, reading his lab notes. He was working on a Ghost Portal back then. The first in the world. But it was all wrong, never worked."

"Was that when Vlad had his accident?" Danny asked. An experimental Ghost Portal had blown up in Vlad Masters' face putting him in the hospital for years with Ecto-Acne. Everyone knew about that, what only Danny knew was that the explosion also gave Vlad ghost powers twenty years before a similar accident had given Danny his ghost powers.

"No, that was later. Can you imagine a couple of freshman blowing up a professor's lab? We would have been expelled so fast we would never have gotten our degrees." Danny's mother said, handing Danny the bowl of apple slices so he wouldn't have to keep reaching over to snag them. "That accident happened in our Senior year. We had developed our own design for a ghost portal, based somewhat on Professor Bushrod's design but incorporating numerous developments of our own."

"He tried to fight our patent in court, years later, claiming that we had stolen his designs but the judge ruled that our modification were sufficiently different and because his design had never worked there was no prior art involved. Man, he was pissed. Never spoke to us again."

"That's because he died, sweetie, shortly afterwards," Maddie Fenton corrected.

"He died?" Danny repeated. Suddenly all this sounded interesting. "When was that?"

"Oh, several years ago by now."

"2003." His father explained. "He said we would rue the day. Do you ever hear anyone say 'rue' in normal conversation? I thought that was pretty shirty of him because the three of us had been the best lab assistants he had ever had. We did more research, produced more papers for him than he had produced in the ten years before us. But academics are like that, I guess. 'Publish or Perish.' Always fighting over credit and prior work. I gather there were some really violent arguments in Theoretical Physics over who had contributed to what. On the whole I'm rather glad we went private. Though there were some tough years, aye, Maddie?"

"That's all behind us now." Danny's mom replied sweetly.

"So you were Professor Bushrod's lab assistants" Danny nibbled on an apple slice, thinking furiously. "That must have been awesome. And just because he caught Dad reading a comic in class?"

"Well, no. That came later, after your father aced a couple of his tests."

"I did?" Jack looked up, confused.

"He did?" Danny was just as confused.

"When it comes to things that really matter, your father has a memory like a steel trap. By the time your father had worked off his detention Professor Bushrod had seen his test scores and knew that Jack had to be his lab assistant."

"I've never forgotten an anniversary yet." Jack said proudly.

"Dear, that's because I circle the date on all the calendars in thick red marker."

"But the accident -- Vlad's ecto acne -- wasn't that caused by Dad's forgetfulness?" Danny had been allowed to travel back in time by Clockwork to that moment once when the modern day Vlad had infected Sam and Tucker with a deadly form of Ecto-Acne. That experimental Ghost Portal had blown up because Jack had poured soda pop into the Ecto-filtration unit instead of the proper coolant.

"It didn't happen that way at all," Maddie Fenton corrected. "It was entirely an accident."

Danny wasn't sure whether his mother was covering up for his father carelessness or honestly didn't know how his carelessness had caused the accident. In either case, since this happened long before he was born he couldn't claim to know more about it than his parent did, even though he did.

"So what was Professor Bushrod like?" he asked, changing the subject.

"He was a smart, incredible smart man," Jack said. "Had a thing about people leaving pizza boxes in the lab, though."

"That was just us, sweetie. None of your professors liked it when you ate in the lab."

" 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do'," Jack quoted. "We had some great brainstorming sessions." Jack smiled at the fond memory. "He was pretty tight with the money, though. Didn't pay us much for being his lab assistants. And he was always docking my pay for breakage. There were times when it was more like I was paying him to be his lab assistant. If it weren't for my scholarships and Vlad's trust fund I don't know how we made it through those years."

"That's true. And all the while he would tell us how he would be making beaucoup bucks from ghost research," Maddie added.

"Wait!" Danny ejaculated. " 'beaucoup bucks.' He said that? A lot?" Danny was suddenly sitting on the edge of the sofa looking intently at his parents.

"Why yes. It's cajun for 'lots of money'," His mother explained. "Professor Bushrod always believed he would become immensely rich from his patents on ghost detection and eradication technology."

"Instead he got kicked out of the university because of Vlad's accident..." Jack Fenton sighed.

"Vlad sued the university for millions because of his accident, dear," Maddie Fenton told Danny. To Jack she said, "You were just lucky Vlad didn't include us in the suit."

"Sue his best friend? Vladdie would never do that!"

"He was in a lot of pain at the time, sweetie, It's hard to say what he would have done."

"But Professor Bushrod like saying 'Beaucop Bucks'?" Danny persisted.

"Yes," his mother answered. "We sort of made it into a joke about him during Homecoming Week at the University."

Jack Fenton grumbled, "made me look like an idiot."

"Jack, dear, the character of 'Student' was not based on you. We were engaged by then. I would never have let anyone make fun of the man I was going to marry."

"He wore a pillow under his shirt!" Jack raised his voice. "What do you think people were going to think?"

Danny was surprised by how upset his father had become. But his parents were wandering away from the subject. So he asked, "How, exactly, did you make fun of Professor Bushrod?"

"We did a skit about teachers and their students and we called our teacher "Professor Beaucoup Bucks." Maddie explained.

"I imagine he didn't take kindly to that," Danny suggested.

"Oddly enough, he got a kick out of it. He said it showed that his students actually were listening to his lectures. Your father was not as amused."

"So Professor Bushrod like being called Beaucoup Bucks?"

"I guess you could say so."

"Have either of you guys ever hear of a Beauregard C. Buchwald?" Danny asked. The news that his parent' old professor liked being called Beaucoup Bucks was sending chills down his spine. He sensed that he was finally on the trail of the maker of the zombie-bot ghosts clones.

"Can't say I know much about him. Did a lot of work for the Guys in White. Claimed to have invented a Ghost Zone Radio but could never get it to work," Jack Fenton said off-handedly. "Didn't he die a few years ago?"

"I think you're right," Maddie agreed. "I don't recall anything else about him."

"He never worked for Professor Bushrod? Never went to State University with you guys?"

"Doesn't ring a bell."

"So, no connection with Professor Bushrod?"

"No, not at all. Why are you interested in our old college professor, Danny?"

"You guys never talk about your college days," Danny extemporized, "and since I'll be going to college in just a few years, I thought I could pick up a few pointers on college life."

"Hard to think of our little boy going off to college, Maddie? It seems like only last week I was changing his diapers."

"Jack, you fainted at the smell of dirty diapers."

"Dad, if Professor Bushrod had sent you an E-mail would it have gone through the normal computer filters or would have bypassed the filters because he was on the whitelist?" Spam was normally controlled one of to ways, through a "blacklist," a list of always suspicious sites or through a "whitelist" a list of friendly, certified virus free sites. Whitelists are short and easier to manage while blacklists are enormous in size and slow down processing greatly

"He's dead, Danny, it's not like he's going to be sending us any E-mails now." his father told him.

"But when he was alive did you have him in the whitelist or blacklist?"

"Blacklist my old college professor? Never!"

"When he died, did you remove his name from the whitelist?"

"Of course I -- er -- Maddie, do you recall if I did?"

"Can't say that you did or didn't, sweetie." Maddie Fenton was nibbling on a baby carrot. She was thoughtful for a moment. "You know, Dear, you probably ought to revise the Whitelist. I don't recall when the last time you did that."

Jack looked uncomfortable. Like, Danny, Jack Fenton had an aversion to doing chores. "Danny, why all this interest in the E-mail?" he asked

"I sort of thought my computer had picked up a virus and since it was linked to the web through the mainframe I was worried that maybe the mainframe had gotten infected."

"A virus on the Fenton Mainframe -- I'd better look into that." Jack Fenton hopped up and hurried off towards the stairs leading into the basement.

His mother watched Jack go and sighed. She turned off the TV. "I think I'll just head off to bed. Your father will be busy for hours down there." As she got up she handed the platter of vegetables to Danny. "Put these away when you're done," she instructed. Before straightening up she grabbed one last broccoli floweret and dabbed it with dip. "See you in the morning," she called, going upstairs.

Danny gave her a count of ten, pushed the vegetable platter aside and dashed upstairs.

"Jazz! Jazz!" he called bursting into her room, then frozen horrified.

His sister was in her underwear, holding the little black dress in front of her, studying the effect in her dresser's mirror. Jazz screamed for him to get out just as Danny, finding his feet again, backed out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him.

A moment later the door was yanked open and Jazz, now bundled in a robe, stuck her head out. "Never barge into my room!" She scolded, "Do I barge into your room?"

"All the time. I'm sorry. I'll probably be traumatized for weeks, but we're got to talk. I think I know who Beaucoup Bucks is!"

"Shouldn't you be talking about this to your friends?" Jazz pushed Danny back and finished emerging from her room. "We'll talk in your room," she told him.

"You know Mom will never let you wear that dress," Danny guessed that the reason she didn't want him in her room.

"Of course she will. You just don t understand women, and you never will."

Danny opened the door to his room. Jazz moved a bag off his bed and made herself comfortable on a corner. Danny spun the chair at his computer around and faced her. "I was talking with Mom and Dad tonight and they mentioned that their old college professor, a guy named Bushrod liked to use the expression 'beaucoup bucks'. That doesn't make him our villain, But he was obsessed with making money from ghost research, Mom said. And they did a play about him where he was called Professor Beaucoup Bucks.

"This all sounds weak, Danny.

"Wait, there s more. He died a few years ago, which would put him in the Ghost Zone, where we all agree these attacks have come from. And because he's Dad's old college professor he would be on the Mainframe's whitelist . He could upload a virus to the computer without it being caught. That's how my computer would have gotten infected, and from that, everyone else's."

"It still seems kind of weak, Danny. I think this Buchwald is a better candidate."

"But Buchwald doesn't exist. From what Tucker and Abigail could find out from searching the Internet, Buchwald has never paid taxes, never owned property, never had a gas or water bill. Nothing. But Bushrod does, or did exist. We can find out where he last lived and that's got to be where he had his Ghost Zone Portal, relay or whatever!"

"It wouldn't hurt looking into Bushrod , I guess. Don't expect me to do any driving for you, though."

"I thought you wanted to help me?" Danny asked.

"I do. I think being the level-headed sister does help you a lot."

"I mean -- oh, never mind. I'll call Tucker and Sam."

Jazz left. Danny looked at the clock. It was late. But they would be so excited to hear about this -- wouldn't they? Danny stifled a yawn. Who was he kidding. The were all tire from the drive home. He'd call in the morning.

***

Tucker was still sleeping when Danny called the next morning and Sam wasn't answering her phone. When Danny called the house line, the housekeeper said she gone off to the community pool earlier. So Danny changed into swim trucks and told Tucker to meet him at the pool.

Even though it was still early in the day the pool was already crowded. They found Sam swimming laps in the deep end of the pool. She must have crossed the pool five times before she noticed them, something not easy to do since Tucker insisted on wearing his red beret. Sam pulled herself up on the edge of the pool, shedding water like a sleek otter.

"I didn't expect either of you guys to be up for another hour," Sam said. "I was just going to swim a few more laps, shower and beat it home before you called."

"You swim here often?" Danny asked. "How do you keep your pallor in all this sun?"

"SPF 100 sun block. It's what all us Goths wear when we have to go out in the sun. Also, does this look like a pallor?" Sam held her arm next to Danny s thigh. Danny rarely wore shorts so his legs were particularly white. Next to them Sam's arm looked decidedly -- off white. Not brown exactly but clearly darker than Danny's legs.

"Ah, Sam, haven't I seen that bathing suit before?" Danny asked. She was wearing the Indigo blue suit Danny had picked out just two days before.

"Could be."

"You snuck back to the gift shop and bought it?" Danny asked, admiring how good it looked on her.'

"Heck, no! Someone would have seen it and made an issue of it. That's what cell phones are for. I ordered it and had it expressed home. Whatever got you two out of bed this early must be really important so -- race you to the other side," and Sam slipped into the pool and started swimming.

Danny flung his rolled up towel to the base of the fence surrounding the pool and leaped in after Sam.

"I'm going to the Water Slide," Tucker called after them and walked around the pool and got in line. He figured that they'd find him when they got through horse-playing . At the top of the line he was surprised to find Valerie Grey working as lifeguard. Valerie was another of the small number of blacks in Casper High, a little on the plump side but good looking, often cranky from working two and three part time jobs at once. In her ludicrously brief free time she rode around on a high-tech flying surfboard looking for ghosts, and in particular -- Danny Phantom. All that aside Val was kind of nice, and a little sweet on Danny Fenton . Tucker chatted with her for a couple minutes, letting people behind him go down first. Finally Tucker throw himself into the flumway and screamed all the way down. When he bobbed up in the water at the foot of the slide his beret was, astonishingly, not wet.

He was getting in line again when Sam and Danny came up. Danny told them about Professor Bushrod as the line advanced. Then Tucker took the plunge down the slide, with Sam and Danny following close after. Danny had thrown himself into the tube with so much vigor that his legs were tangled up with Sam's when they splashed into the pool. They surfaced with a laugh, only to get a scowl from the lifeguard working that end of the slide. "Get a room," she suggested. Danny knew he wasn't supposed to centipede on the water slide like that but how could he resist.

They dressed and rode their mo-peds over to the Nasty Burger for late a breakfast and talked some more about Professor Bushrod . Tucker got out his PDA and programmed in some searches for the Professor. As they had concluded in Chicago, Beaucoup Bucks had to have a live connection from the Ghost Zone to the Internet, and that meant some kind of Ghost Zone Portal, maybe the radio portal that Buchwald had tried to promote. But that meant he had to own some piece of property to site the portal. And he needed some kind of electrical connection to power it. So there ought to be some kind of record of his presence on the Internet, leading to a physical location where all these attacks had come from. Abigail had her laptop do searches for Beaucoup Bucks anḑ Beauregard C. Buchwald at the hotel and had come up empty. This new name, though, might just be the link they were looking for.

Tucker and Danny had, naturally, taken one side of the booth, giving Sam the other side, But as the search results started coming in Sam slid around, pushing Danny and Tucker back, so that all three were crowded around the PDA looking at the results together. There was a death notice from Social Security and an obituary from State University's newspaper. The obit glided over the reason why Bushrod had left his position in 1987, though it did have a statement from Vlad Masters who fondly remember his teacher. There was notices of his patent infringement suit against Jack Fenton two years before his death, but no notes on the outcome of the trial. In fact a year after the trial, in 2002, Harold V. Bushrod simply disappeared. There were no notices of taxes paid, no records of him in either the gas, water or electric utilities. No cable subscriptions. No credit cards bills, no telephone records.

"Go back to the obituary," Danny suggested. "Maybe it lists where he died." But the article was blank on that.

"Who reported him dead?" Sam wondered. The obituary was dumb on that as well.

Likewise the Social Security death notice. "Are we even sure he really died," Sam wondered. "Maybe he's faked his death and is hiding somewhere."

Tucker began thumbing through dozens of open web pages. "Wait, wait. I got it, there!" he announced. He pointed to an entry in a Vermont cemetery where the ashes of one Harold V. Bushrod had been interred in 2003. "He's dead alright, but his ghost lives on."

"West Mill Race, Vermont. Isn't that where he was born?" Danny asked. Tucker went back to the obituary, then nodded.

"So if he was born there and was buried there, maybe he lived there as well?"

"Maybe not," Sam interjected. "That burial notice mentions delivery by DHL . A local cremation would have been delivered by a local funeral house. DHL does interstate shipments so his ashes could have come anywhere. All we have to do if find the shipping numbers for his remains, get into DHL's computer and look it up -- "

"I don't think so," Tucker objected. "I'm willing to break into the school's computer for you, Danny. Maybe even the public library's computer but I draw the line at a big corporation with tons of lawyers."

"We need someone reckless and foolish enough to do this," Sam concluded. The three looked at each other for a moment, then said simultaneously, "Abigail."

***

They trooped back to FentonWorks because Danny didn't have Abigail's number on his cell phone.

"You are so into me!" Abigail chirped as she answered. "It's not 24 hours since we left the hotel and you're already calling me!"

Danny's phone s volume had been turned up so everyone could hear. Sam was bowed over laughing. Abigail must have heard because she asked, "am I on speaker-phone?"

"Close enough."

"Oh. -- If you re looking for me to break into the old man's computer, you are so out of luck."

"What happened, get caught using the strato-cycle?"

"Worse, the human slug has decided to work from home this week! I can't get to his computer -- he's always there."

"Even in the middle of the night?" Danny asked.

"I'm not getting up in the middle of the night!" she protested.

"It s pretty juicy," Danny hinted.

"It would have to be awfully juicy to get me up at 3 AM!"

"We think we know who Beaucoup Bucks is."

"The guy making those computer virus ghosts?"

"Right."

"I m listening."

"We think it is my parent's old college professor, Harold V. Bushrod . He always used the phrase 'Beaucoup Bucks' to describe how he was going to make a fortune from ghost technology. He died about the same time as Buchwald, and he was working on a Ghost Zone portal, which could have become Buchwald's Ghost Zone Radio."

"So why do you need me to get up in the middle of the night to break in the old man's computer?"

"Because we lost all trace of him about a year before he died. He stopped all utility services, telephone, Internet. More importantly he sold all land he was know to have had. That was in February of 2002. He died and was buried in April of 2003. But the obituary didn't say where he died, but it looked to be out of state." Danny paused, not sure what more to add.

"How can I help?" Abigail asked. "I doubt that the Guys In White have any more information than what you've already dug up."

"I'm counting on them maintaining detailed surveillance of people involved in ghost research." Danny explained. Then he added, "I know they do with Dad."

"If he disappeared before he died," Abigail was saying, "it sounds like he was planning to become this Beaucoup Bucks."

Sam was listening to what Abigail was saying, then noticed something trapped under her boot. She reached down and picked up a well-folded brochure. She was going to drop it on Danny's bed when she noticed an arrow pointing to "Jefferson Memorial." She started unfolding the sheet. Danny stopped what he was saying and stared at her in silent horror. The brochure proved to be a map for a Washington, DC bus tour. Danny remembered stuffing the map in his hip pocket when he had secretly gone to Washington to visit Abigail. It must have fallen out of his pocket when he came home that night and had been laying on the floor until then.

"What's this, Sam asked. "When were you in DC?"

"There was an "Oops!" from the phone and Abigail hung up. Danny was red-faced, unable to answer.

"Was this when you were at that 'gaming convention' Tucker and I never heard of before?"

Tucker cleared his throat. "I -- uh -- got to be -- uh -- going. I've got -- uh -- see ya."

Sam grabbed Tucker's arm and pulled him back on the bed. "What do you know about this?" she demanded.

"Nothing! I'm as surprised as you."

"You're Danny's friend, you'd said that even if you did know." Sam groused.

"I swear I don't know what's going on," Tucker repeated.

"I suppose you don't know either?" Sam asked Danny.

"No, I know," he muttered. "I just didn't want to tell you because you'd--"

"I'd what? -- go ballistic? have a cow? punch you in the nose?"

"Do pretty much what you're doing."

"You went to Washington, DC without telling us? To see Abilgail, wasn't it?"

Danny nodded. "It was the only way I could get her to break into her father's computer the first time."

"You went on a date with her to get into her father's computer?"

"It wasn't a date!"

"You traveled across half the country to see her, don't tell me that's not a date!"

Tucker stood up again. "Look, I'm going. I'll catch up with you guys later."

"Don't bother, I'm going!" Sam declared and stalked out of the room.

"Sam wait," Danny called, then raced after her.

Tucker sat back down and waited.

After a while he picked up Danny's cell phone and hit redial. Abigail answered on the first ring."You know," he said to the speaker, "you are a piece of work." and hung up.

***

Danny ran after Sam. She had stormed out of the FentonWorks and charged down the street, leaving her mo-ped behind. She saw him catching up and quickened her pace but refused to break into a run.

Danny, running, caught up with her and pulled her over to a stoop of one of the brownstone buildings lining the street. "I'm sorry, Sam." Danny said. "I realize it was a dumb idea but I was desperate to learn anything about that ghost I could and didn't see any other way to get her to do it."

"You could have come to me, Danny. We could have figured something out."

"I guess. Why are you so upset about Abigail? You were never this upset when I was going out with Val?"

"I don't know. I guess I never figured you and Val would ever last."

"Oh, come on, we had a lot in common."

"What," Sam snorted. "Outside of you being a ghost and she was trying to kill you."

"That had nothing to do with it. She never knew I was a ghost. We were strictly people."

"Technus was manipulating you."

"Not at first, Sam. Anyway that's all history now. Val's got too many jobs to see anyone."

They were quiet for a moment. Then Danny began, "Sam, you've got to understand: there is nothing going on between Abigail and me."

"She's pretty."

"So are you."

"She's perky. I'm just an old sourpuss."

"A little perkiness goes a long way, after a while it gets tiresome."

"I'm still mad that you didn't think to tell me about this."

"I was too embarrassed."

"You should be."

"Will you forgive me?"

Sam gave him a swift, sharp glance. "I'll always hold this against you but I guess I can get over being angry with you." She stood up. "Let's get Tucker before he thinks the worst of us."

***

They dragged Tucker to see a move they had already seen, then played video games in the theater's lobby. It was a subdued group that broke up in the early afternoon. Danny returned home to look over the print-outs they're already made hoping to find a clue where Harold V. Bushrod had been before he died. But nothing popped out at him. Danny sought out his father, hoping to ask him more questions about his old professor, but his father was working on some bugs in the Fenton Yo-yo. Telescopic binoculars obscured his face as he probed the circuitry of the opened device. Remembering how one prototype had blown up unexpectedly, Danny decided to give it a wide berth.

When night came he fell into bed exhausted but unable to sleep. If he could just solve this last riddle of Beaucoup Bucks, destroy his Ghost Radio, put an end to his attempt to take over the world then life would get back to normal. He and Sam would get back to normal.

Somewhere in all this he must have fallen asleep because when his cell phone rang he was in the middle of a weird and twisted dream. He sat up with a start, relieved to be out of it. Then the phone rang again and he began feeling around for it in the dark.

He didn't need to be told it was late at night. He wondered who would be calling him at this time of the night.

He croaked, "hello?"

"I'm in," a familiar, perky voice told him.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12 - Abigail to the Rescue

Somewhere in all this he must have fallen asleep because when his cell phone rang he was in the middle of a weird and twisted dream. He sat up with a start, relieved to be out of it. Then the phone rang again and he began feeling around for it in the dark.

He didn't need to be told it was late at night. He wondered who would be calling him at this time of the night.

He croaked, "hello?"

"I'm in," a familiar, perky voice told him.

"Abigail?"

"What did you say that guy's name was, your father old teacher?"

It was starting to come back, he had asked her to look up the professor on the Guys in White computer system. "Bushrod, ah, Harold V as in Victor Bushrod." he mumbled. "I thought you weren't going to do this?"

"Bushrod. I thought that's who you said. Wow, the GIW have been very naughty people."

"What are you talking about?"

"They've got secret files in hundreds of people. I don't think their charter allows them to do that."

"But they have one on Professor Bushrod?"

"Yup. Lots of stuff here." Abigail whispered. "It's going to take forever to sort through all of it."

"Can you just email me the file?"

"That would leave a record on his computer."

"What can you give me?" Danny asked.

"I can photograph anything interesting off the monitor. What are the dates we're interested in?"

"Anything after February, 2002," Danny told her. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, now. He flipped a light on and dug out some paper and a pen so he could take notes.

"Hey, this may be what you're looking for, January 18, 2002, incorporation papers for something called Mountaintop Enterprises. Bushrod seems to be the only officer. Gives an address in South Carolina."

Danny flipped open his laptop and typed "Mountaintop Enterprises" into his search engine. "I'm getting several hits from Google," he told Abigail. "I wonder if I can find it on Google Earth?"

That program would take a while to load. In the meantime he asked Abigail to photograph all the information on the company and send it to him.

"Here's something interesting," she told him, "a field agent's report. Says the property covers the entirety of a "Shattered Rock Mountain," so it really is a mountaintop enterprise. The land is fenced off, accessible by a dirt road. Two employyes, caretakers apparently. No electricity, or city utilities. Telephone was run on at the owner's expense in 2003...."

"2003!" Danny echoed.

"Yeah. Could be before he died, you know."

"April, 2003?"

"It doesn't say in the report when the line was put in."

"I've got a view from Google Earth," Danny said. "Doesn't look like much. There's a clearing with a smallish house and a couple outhouses..."

"Man must love his toilets," Abigail cracked.

"No, I mean smaller buildings. There's a parking lot down a short decline. Looks paved, maybe room to four cars. No garage."

"Oops, my camera is out of room," Abigail interrupted. "I'm going to get out of his study and then send you the stuff I have. I think I've got everything important." Abigail paused for a moment. "This was fun, we should do it more often," followed by a quick bye, and she hung up.

A few minutes later Danny's phone rang again, this time filling up with photographs of the documents shown on the screen. Danny copied them to his computer and printed them out. Abigail texted to say she was going back to bed leaving Danny was alone with all the print-outs.

He read through them all twice. Taking notes of what seemed like important points. When he was done he had to admit that all of Mr. Lancer's tedious drilling about how to take notes and write up citations had actually been of help. It discouraged him for a moment to think that a teacher might actually have done him something good.

According to the field report the cottage on the top of the mountain was visited about once a week by an old man, Forrester, and his middle-aged son. They rarely stayed for more than a hour, mowed the grass in the summer, raked leaves in the fall. Put up storm windows for winter. The Forresters were never seen bringing supplies to the house indicating occupation. Reading over the numbing list of observations Danny suspected that the life of a spy must be a lot duller than it appeared in the movies.

The important information, Danny thought, was the GPS location for the house. His cell phone had built in GPS. So he programmed it to find the house. The sun was just beginning to come up by now. Danny debated whether to grab a couple hours sleep before talking to the others about this. He realized that he was too keyed up to sleep. He wanted this puzzle solved and solved now.

Danny dressed then wrote out a note for his mom, saying he'd gone over to Tucker's and left if on the kitchen table for her to find. He switched to his ghost self and flew out the window, checked the direction on the GPS display and took off east, into the rising sun.

***

South Caroline was a bit farther on then Danny had. He was beginning to get, not so much tired, but bored. By the time he finally crossed the state line. He'd been flying through the mountains for some time, the back end of the Appalachians. He had been flying a direct line towards Shattered Rock Mt. The only reason Danny knew he had reached South Carolina was when the display on his GPS rolled over to SC when showing his current location. The mountains around here all seemed alike, not so much individual peaks but parts of long ridges, following one after the other like waves on the ocean. Occasionally the ridge would rise to a point and that would be a mountain. It was all covered with trees, a region almost too wild for logging. Or maybe this was second-growth forest, still too young to be harvested. Danny didn't know.

He followed the arrow on his cell phone's GPS until he suddenly spotted it, looking surprising like the image from GoogleEarth. There was the cottage, two smaller older buildings and one newish one, looking like a large garden utility shed, maybe sixteen feet by sixteen foot square. On the paved parking lot down the slope was a big pick-up truck. Danny couldn't be sure, maybe it was just the caretakers, but someone was up on the mountain top.

He turned himself invisible and cautiously swooped down into the clearing.

The door to the new utility shed was open so Danny headed there first, The door was six feet wide, sliding on a track mounted on one corner of the building. The shed itself was six feet tall at the corners, slopping up to a peak eight feet high. It was all sheet metal, mounted on some old railroad ties sunk into the ground. There were no other windows or doors to the building.

Cautiously Danny looked around the corner of the shed inside. He could see three eight foot long folding tables set in a "U." The tables were set back from a walls a couple feet leaving little room left in the building for anything. On two of the tables were rows of computers, four to each table. The computers looked brand-new, in fact boxes were piled up in a corner along with plastic bags, molded styroform containers and manuals.

Two men were working at the third table setting up computers there. One was short, thin, bald- headed with a scraggily, dirty-white beard. The other was much taller, pot-bellied both otherwise looked like a younger version of the other. Danny figured these must be the Forresters, the caretakers. But why where they set up so many computers up here. For that matter, he wondered how they knew how to set up computers. In his limited experience, people that age didn't any anything about computers.

The he noticed a gossamer silver thread running from each man out of the building and off somewhere. Danny tracked it with his eyes for a moment. It quickly became too hard to see but it looked like it run up to the house.

Ectoplasm

The two men were being overshadowed. Ghosts had possessed them and were forcing them to do what they were doing. The silver thread, though, was different. Perhaps instead of being over-shadowed they were being controlled by remote-control?

Danny slipped into the shed, still keeping invisible and slip closer to the two men. They seemed to be talking to each other. Danny wondered what they were saying.

The younger man was staring at the cable he held in his hand and peering from time to time at the variety of ports on the back of the computer. "Is this teal or lavender?" he groused.

"Since when did you become color-blind," the old man snapped.

"I'm not color-blind, you old coot! It just too dark in here, all these cables look grey to me.

"It's green, you nitwit. It goes in the green connecter."

"Which one's that?

"Are you stupid as well as color-blind."

"I'm not color-blind!. I told you, it's too dark in here to see any color! Why couldn't we string up a light in here? We've got enough generators to do that."

"Do you have any idea what the price of gasoline is, ya idjit?"

"Who do you think filled those six cans of gas sitting in the back of our truck, ya old coot. Of course, I know the price of gas. And we wouldn't hardly use any to use a light in here. We'd get these working a lot faster."

"We're not wasting gas just because you can't see. If you didn't waste all your time reading books," the older man whined, "your eyes won't be to bad."

"My eyes are perfectly good. I just had them checked last spring. It's too dark in here…"

A wisp of blue smoke drifted from Danny's mouth, his Ghost Sense was warning him that a ghostly threat was approaching. He looked towards the door and saw a ghost drifting in. It looked like an old man wearing a lab coat. Beaucoup Bucks, Danny suspected. Like many ghosts its body did not end in feet but faded away in a tail. Only in this case the tail became a tiny silver thread leading out the door to, Danny suspected, the same place as the other two threads. The thread told Danny that Bucks was not in this world but rather, like the zombie-clones, a projection of a ghost. The thread surely lead back to the Ghost Zone Radio. Destroy that and Beaucoup Bucks would be banished from earth.

"Aren't you two done yet?" Bucks demanded.

"It's too dark in here," the younger man complained.

"You're just lazy," the ghost interrupted. "Get these computers set up and hooked to the generators. I want them booted up and networked by noon!"

The two men agreed begrudgingly.

Bucks turned to leave. "I can't believe how impotent I am over here. I can't ever over-shadow someone without most of the personality still in control of the body. Once I get these computers working and pumping out clones it won't matter. A billion clones each perfectly responsive to my every command…. I will own this world. I will own every dollar, pound, euro, yen and yuah in the world. Ha! Ha! Fire me because of that fat ass. No one will ever disrespect Beaucoup Bucks ever again! -- God, I'm talking to myself again. I've got to stop that." He paused. Blue smokes drifted from its mouth. "Look lively, you two," the ghost ordered, swirling back to look at the two possessed caretakers. "I smell a ghost around here."

"That's just my old man," the younger man cracked, "he had beans and onions for breakfast."

"Not true. It wasn't me." The old man snapped.

"Shut up both of you." Bucks ordered. "There's another ghost around here! But who? Keep an eye out while I look around. If you see anything the least bit suspicious give a shout." The ghost turned to go, "And finish those computers!"

Beaucoup Bucks floated out of the shed and circled around it. Danny remained hiding under one of the tables until he saw Bucks drifting off to one side of the clearing. Danny went intangible and walked through the side of the shed. He flew towards the house, then detoured to look into the garage standing next to the house. Heavy electric cables ran from it towards both the house and to the utility shed full of computers.

The garage was empty of the usual clutters that fill most garages. Four gasoline powered generators were lined down the middle. The one at the far end of the garage was old and dirty; the other three were shiny new. Only the old machine was currently running. A heavy cable was plugged into it, running through a hole in a side door leading towards the house. Danny didn't know much about electric generators but he guessed that three generators to power twelve computers amounted to overkill. At least he knew what Beaucoup Bucks had done with all the money he had stolen from the ATM machines back in East Gratiot. Bucks must have directed it straight into these purchases – the generators, the computers, the new shed to put them in. He must have been keeping the Forresters hopping to get so much done in the brief time since T'Keisha had reported his thefts. With a dozen computers linked directly to his Ghost Zone Radio Beaucoup Bucks could generate more clones then even the real Technus could over-ride. If he hadn't decided on this visit today, Bucks could have taken over the world before anyone had known about it.

Danny followed the cable from the running generator through the garage wall and into the house.

The house was little more than a cabin twenty-four feet by about thirty. A wall divided the building into two. Danny guessed there was a bed room behind one door and a bathroom behind a second. A kitchen filled one corner and a fireplace the other corner of the front half of the building. There were no dishes in the kitchen, no wood in the fireplace and no furniture in the middle of the room. If Harold V. Bushrod had ever lived here there was certainly no evidence of it now.

Dominating the empty room and its only piece of furniture was a desktop model of a Ghost Zone portal. It reminded Danny of the desktop portal his parents and Vlad Masters had constructed twenty years before, the one that had blown up and changed Vlad's life forever. The one he had seen because Clockwork had let him travel back in time.

Except Danny could see many obvious differences between this portal, the original prototype and the working unit in his family's basement. The frame of the portal was a pentagon and an irregular one at that. Danny wasn't sure why his folk's was six sided or Vlad's was eight-sided but he suspected that it had something to do with why theirs worked and this one didn't. The ecto-filtration unit didn't have a recirculator, the reifier wasn't grounded and the portal itself was sealed behind stainless steel.

"Impressive, isn't it?" a voice behind him declared.

"It's a piece of junk."

"It is not. It is the finest development of the human mind. Its like is not to be found anywhere in the world!"

"Then why doesn't it work?" Danny asked.

Beaucoup Bucks stalked around in front if him. "What do you mean 'doesn't work?' I'm here aren't I? I'm living proof that it works."

"You've got the portal interface sealed off. It will never work as long as the portal is - -"

"Who are you?" Bucks demanded, looking at Danny closely. "How do you know so much about my great machine?" After another close look at Danny, Beaucoup Bucks stepped back, clutching his head in sudden pain. "Fenton!" he hissed.

Danny felt a cold chill run down his spine. How could the late Professor Bushrod know his name?

"My god, that fat ninney has spawned!"Bucks continued. "Will my life never be rid of that walking disaster, Jack Fenton?"

"You have me confused with someone else. I'm Danny Phantom. The ghost kid, the Halfa. I'm sure you've heard of me." Danny tried bluffing.

"Oh, do not prevaricate with me, child. You've got your father's eyes, his nose and in another twenty years his bulging gut! I know you. You're Jack Fenton's son. Who would be stupid enough to marry him?"

"That's my mother you're talking about."

"The poor woman."

"Look," Danny yelled, "Professor Dork-rod. We're the ones with the working Portal in our basement. You've got squat. You're not even really in this world. You're just a hologram or something. Don't call my father a jerk and don't you ever call my mother - - whatever it was you were going to call her!"

"Hologram? Can a hologram do this?" without waiting for an answer Beaucoup Bucks split into three, each blasting Danny with a torrent of ectoplasm. Vaguely Danny heard the generator in the garage surge as it compensated for energy being thrown at him. The ferocious attack drove him to his knees.

Danny threw up a shield, deflecting some of the energy from the ecto-plasmic blasts away from himself. He forced himself to his feet and launched himself at the ghost. He hit one hard and it popped out of existence like the zombie-clones. But as Danny turned to concentrate on the remaining two, another ghost began oozing out of the Ghost Zone Radio. The two ghosts moved apart, placing Danny in a withering crossfire. He dived into the floor, shoot outside through the ground before returning through a wall. His first shot popped another of the Beaucoup Bucks ghosts but just as Danny exhalting, he was struck in the back by a blast of ectoplasm. Bucks has exuded another ghost through the Radio. Danny returned fire, but it dodged.

Seeing a clear shot at the Ghost Zone Radio, Danny snapped off a powerful blast at the machine. The green ooze bounced off a protective shield. Danny tried again. This time his blast smashed in closer to the portal but was still deflected before it could cause damage.

A flurry of blasts from the Beaucoup Bucks ghost drove Danny away. Taking shelter in the unused fireplace, Danny tried reaching deep inside him for his Ghostly Wail. That would destroy the Radio, and just about everything else on the mountain top, but to his dismay, Danny couldn't find the energy welling out of him as he usually did. He had also exhausted himself. He was going to have to finish this with just his skill, wit and luck.

Danny bolted through the cabin wall into the clearing outside. Beaucoup Bucks followed.

With the wider spaces Danny was able to twist and swerve around the blasts from the three Bucks ghosts. The occasional strikes stung like everything but lacked the punch of a hit from a Vlad Plasmeus or a Skulker. Apparently by dividing into multiple ghosts Bucks was also dividing his power. From time to time Danny was able to 'pop' one of the ghosts but a replacement would exude from the Radio almost as fast as he destroyed them.

Danny had done this five or six times when he noticed that the new ghost, instead of moving off to one side to attack him, was flying right towards another of Beaucoup Buck's selves - - and merged with it. The third part of Bucks' self flew in and merged as well. The ghost seemed to glow brighter now and when it launched an energy blast at Danny, its impact rocked him harder than any three blasts had before.

With only one ghost to watch Danny didn't have to spend as much time on defense. He threw himself at Beaucoup Bucks, plastering him with a series of blows to the head and shoulders. The ghost was staggered by the unexpected physical assault and fell heavily to the ground. Danny fell on top of him, grabbing hold of his lab coat and shook him furiously.

"Why are you doing this?" he should. "Why are you causing all this damage and destruction? You're a scientist! Isn't this against everything you pledged to protect?"

"My boy, you're confusing me with a doctor. They're pledged to do no harm. Scientists like myself take no pledges. We're interested in how the world works but it's irrelevant whether life survives our examination."

"That's crazy."

"Hardly. I'm not the one who sacrificed his son to create a working Ghost Zone Portal. That's crazy. I just want the money."

"Sacrifice? What are you talking about?"

"I always thought there might be a missing variable to the creation of a working portal into the Ghost Zone but I was never sure what. But it's obvious now what that missing element was -- human sacrifice. Clearly a portal can only be formed when someone dies. Your death is what formed the Portal."

"I'm not dead!"

"But you are a ghost. Tell me, in the name of science, how did that happen? Oh, and could you not press down quite so hard on my throat?"

Danny shifted some of his weight off the knee he was using to hold Bucks pinned to the ground. "Dad had nothing to do with it. I was exploring the portal when it was accidentally turned on. Something in the build up of the field gave me ghost-like powers, but I never died."

"No one ever thinks that they have -- at first." Bucks sneered. "I must have been in the Ghost Zone for a whole day before realizing that I had died -- and I had been expecting it. Dying, that is."

"You knew you were going to die?"

"When you reach my age, you do. God, you're as dense as your father. Haven't you ever considered that the energies needs to tear a hole in the Space-Time Continuum and bridge to the Ghost Zone would tear any human mortal to shreds?"

"No…"

"Idiot! Fool! You're as stupid as your father."

"Stop talking about my father like that!" Danny shouted into Bucks' face, leaning heavily on the knee pressing into Bucks' throat.

"Sorry," Bucks gurgled. "I forget that you are just a child. Think, boy, before you stuck your nose into that portal, did it work?"

"No."

"Exactly! But when you were in the Portal transition area and the power was turned on, the portal was opened. Your death provided the last ingredient needed to create it. I've suspected it but never had the nerve to actually put someone to death to test my theory."

"You're nuts!"

"You're just denying the obvious. It all makes sense now. It takes ectoplasm on both sides of the Portal to open it up, but the only source of ectoplasm in this world is that given up when someone dies? Ask yourself, does anyone else have a working Ghost Zone Portal?"

Danny was about to say 'Vlad Masters does,' but he was filled with doubt. Vlad had gained ghost powers like Danny's when he had been peering into a proto-type Portal just as Jack Fenton had thrown on the power. He hadn't 'died' any more than Danny had, nor had the Portal worked, so Beaucoup Bucks had to be wrong. "Could a ghost in this world open a Portal into the Ghost Zone?" he asked instead.

"You mean a ghost like you? Of Course. If what I suspect is true, you could make all the Ghost Zone Portals in the world. But without another fool wandering into the interface zone, your bloated oaf of a father never will!"

"No. This is all wrong. People shouldn't have to die to connect to the Ghost Zone."

"Why not, it's unnatural to enter the Ghost Zone while still alive.

"You're wrong! You're wrong!"

"The beauty of science, dear boy, which I hope will not be lost on you, is that when you think something is wrong all you have to do is disprove it. If you think I'm wrong about human sacrifices -- then show me I'm wrong!" Bucks broke into a fit of hysterical laughter.

The boom of a shotgun startled Danny just as a vast fist slammed into his chest. He was thrown off Beaucoup Bucks by the impact and fell to the ground stunned. As he scrambled to his feet, pellets rattled out of his ghostly body and fell on to the ground. In the distance, just at the edge of the decline to the small parking area, the taller of the two caretakers was reloading a shotgun. Danny sprinted across the ground, grabbing the gun from the man just as he was raising it to his shoulder. With a burst of his ghost-powers, Danny threw the gun far out into the valley below.

The man swung at Danny with his fists. Danny dodged, stooped down, found the silver thread from Beaucoup Bucks that controlled the man and seized it in ectoplasm-flaring hands, With an effort he tore the thread in two. The younger Forrester froze for a second, shook his head as if awakening from a dream.

"Run!" Danny screamed, "Get your father and get out of here. It's not safe!" Then remembering that the elder Forrester was still over-shadowed by Bucks, Danny tore off in search of the old man.

The elder Forrester wasn't hard to find. He was down at their truck wrestling an ax out of a jumble of tools behind the passenger seat. Danny seized it from his hands and slammed the blade down on the silvery cord that was controlling him. The thread parted easily on contract with the iron ax head. The old man collapsed to the ground as the control was lost then struggled to his feet. "Junior! Junior" he called.

The younger man was scrambling down the slope. "Here I am!" he called back.

"Let's get the heck out of here!" He scrambled around to the driver's side and yanked the door open. His son was pulling open the passenger door when both men were hit with a diffuse green cloud of ectoplasm. They dropped to the ground unconscious. Beaucoup Bucks soared past overhead. "You're not going anywhere!" he shouted. "You're still on the clock!"

"You killed them!" Danny screams launching himself after Beaucoup Bucks.

"Hardly, I need their hands to finish my work. Unlike you, I don't have a physical presence in this world." They exchanged a series of blows. Danny caught Bucks by the lab coat, dragging it down his arms, pinioning Bucks in a makeshift strait-jacket.

"Why are you doing this?" He demanded.

"I need the money." Bucks repled

"For what? You're dead!"

"For my research. All my life I have had to beg, borrow, cajole, wheedle and plead for money to continue my research. It was demeaning. And there was never enough. Now I'm going to have all the money I need – because I'm going to have all the money in the world! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"You're mad you know." Danny said when Bucks was done laughing manically.

"Yes, alas, death tends to do that to one. But nonetheless I intend to take over all the computers in the world with my Technus clones, collect all the world's money and use it as I see fit! People will have to beg *me* for money. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

"What kind of research?" Danny asked intrigued by Professor Bushrod/Beaucoup Bucks' intentions. Most of the villains he had fought were just crazy, but Bucks almost seemed rational.

"The same research I've always done."

"Ghost research? But you are a ghost?"

"There's still so much to learn."

"You're nuts."

"But I'm going to be the richest nut in the world"

As Beaucoup Bucks laughed maniacally Danny dropped him and sped through the air towards the cabin. Reasoning with Professor Bushrod / Beaucoup Bucks was pointless but the only thing keeping Bucks in this world was the Ghost Zone Radio. That was the key. That was what had to go.

Bucks was struggling to get free from his twisted lab coat, then, realized his danger. He set off in pursuit. He burst into the cabin to see Danny poised in front of the Radio pouring a steady stream of ectoplasmic fire at it. The deflector shields were holding but slowing ctumpling under the assault.

"Confound you, boy!" Bucks screamed, and shot Danny in the back. Danny gasped and fell to the floor. He twisted around and threw up a shield with one hand and continued blasting away at the Radio.

Danny drawled along the floor towards Bucks, holding up a shield of ecto-plasm to ward off Bucks' attacks. With a lunge Danny grabbed hold of Buck's tail, swung him around and threw him towards the Ghost Zone Radio.

Bucks hit the deflector barrio. There was a sizzling sounds, a shower of sparks followed like a loud 'pop' and Bucks' projected presence in the mortal world shorted out. The deflector collapsed and the feedback caused an explosion in the nearby garage. Without the sustaining energy from the generator the Ghost Zone Radio began to collapse in on itself. Danny had planned to stay and watch it self-destruct but as the Radio shook and sparked Danny slowly backed away. He was about at the door when the cover to the Portal fell off. Inside was the familiar raging vortex of a working Portal but the energies were bulging out from the containing frame, darkening in hue yet growing more intense every second. Danny turned to flee when the Portal finally and completely let go. Wave after wave of energy boiled out. Danny was picked up by the force and blown far out into the mountain top's clearing. Searing blasts washed over him, threatening to overwhelm the defensive shield he had thrown up. As blackness swallowed up Danny he could hear peal after rolling peal of thunder. Lightning played around the lonely mountaintop like the act of God at the end of a biblical epic.

***

"Wake up! We don't have much time."

Danny squinted through aching eyes into a haze of reddish hair. Hands were tugging at his shoulder.

"Abigail?"

"Come on! The guys in white will be here in five or ten minutes."

Danny moved to sit up. Every joint ached. He felt like a microwaved marshmellow. As an afterthought he glanced down at his body to see whether he was Phantom or Fenton. He was dressed in a black jumpsuit so he was still in ghost form. He asked, "What happened?"

"You tell me, I wasn't here." the girl had slipped Danny's arm over her shoulder, as if she could support his weight. But it got his feet under him. After a moment he stood on his own, stretched sore muscles into a better fit and looked around at what was left of Mountaintop Enterprises. It looked like a lightning bolt had hit the entire mountain. The cabin with all the computers lay scattered in fragments rarely more than a foot in length. The metal roof looked like it was laying in a puddle in a crater.

He had never seen a Ghost Portal collapse before. It gave him a shiver to think about his parent's portal. Beaucoup Bucks' portal had been small, a quarter the size of his parent's. If that little portal had done this, his parent's portal could take out most of Amity Park if it failed.

A hand was tugging on him. Abigail."Where's Danny and the others?"

He shook off her hand. "They're safe back in Amity Park. Where are the caretakers?" he asked. Danny staggered through the rubble until he found them, far down the path to the car park. Both men were singed and covered in Ecto-Acne. But they were breathing and to Danny's senses free of any spectral over-shadowing.

"You don't want to be found here when the Guys in White show up." Abigail was calling from the top of the peak. Danny tried flying but nothing happened. He was still whacked out from the Portal collapsing. Danny stumbling back up the path. Abigail grabbed him and dragged him over to where a Strato-cycle was parked.

The red-haired girl helped him into the seat then got on in front of him. Se reached back and grabbed his hands and pulled them around her waist. "Hang on tight," she called back to Danny. Then added, "But don't think you can cop a feel."

"Wasn't planning to."

"Why not?" Abigail whined. Her answer left Danny confused. But before he could say more she had jerked the Strato-cycle off the ground and around in a dizzying loop before heading off to the nearest other mountain peak. She pulled in between a couple of tall pines, jockeyed around them until the Cycle was hidden from view. Danny followed as she made her way back to the edge of the forested area. A fallen tree provided cover farther out on the mountain, offering them a clear view of Beaucoup Bucks former headquarters.

"What are you doing out here?" Danny asked as they made them comfortable behind the dead tree. "Why did you rescue me? I'd figure you would want the Guys in White to find me."

"I owe Fenton one."

"Really?" Danny studied her face in the dappled shadows. In the short while he'd know Abigail Farley Smythe-Hyde owing favors or paying off favors never seemed high on her priorities.

"Fenton's all right, even if he has wretched taste in girlfriends and since you're a friend of his I thought I ought to come out to help."

"And nothing else?"

"And miss this, no way! What happened? You took out half the power in South Carolina."

"What?"

"Message thatcame calling for the Guys In White mentioned that the electrical grid in South Carolina had been knocked out! How did you do that? Why did you do that?"

Danny explained about the collapsing Portal. "How did you get out here ahead of your father?" he in turn asked.

"They had to stop to fill out a flight plan. I didn't."

"And they let you take a Strato-cycle?"

"It's the one my old man has in the tool shed. They're taking an Osprey troop transport down so he drove to the airport."

"Thanks for the help, in case I hadn't mentioned it before." He looked at his watch. "Oh, man! Look! It melted my watch!" Danny showed Abigail his watch which was bent in two different dimensions. The plastic cover on the dial had disappeared."

"Wow! Aren't you burned?"

Danny pulled up his sleeve, the ectoplasmic 'flesh' of his wrist was unharmed. "Pays to be a ghost, some times. From what you're saying there must have been an E. M. P. when the portal let go."

"A what?"

"Electro Magnetic Pulse. It's a gigantic magnetic field. It'll cause electric currents on conductive surfaces, burning out switches and relays. You're lucky the EMP didn't knock out your Strato-Cyclo."

"I was coming in from the north and the damage looks to run east-west."

"You were lucky."

"Yeah. There's the plane!" Abigail pointed eastward.

The Osprey was a large plane with four propeller engines. It circled the ruined mountain top a couple times then, with a change of engine pitch, the wings started tilting up until the propellers were pointed directly upwards. The plane cruised slowly over the ground like a helicopter before settling to the ground. Moments latter a dozen men, all dressed in immaculate white suits leaped from the plane and spread out over the destruction. A couple minutes later four men came out with a pair of stretchers and hurried down the trail to the car park where the two caretakers lay.

"Good," Danny breathed. "I was afraid they wouldn't notice those men."

"Who are they?"

Danny explained about them being simple caretakers for the place whom Beaucoup Bucks had over-shadowed when Danny had come to shut down the relay. "I doubt that they will remember anything of what they did when they were over-shadowed, people rarely do. But I'm pretty sure once they start talking to those guys they'll be led to Professor Bushrod and all those computers he was having shipped in."

"Computers?"

"He was using the money he's stole from those ATMs in East Gratiot to build his own bank of computer to create an army of Technus clones."

"So you really did get here in the nick to time."

"I -- we couldn't have done it without your help. If you hadn't been able to find Bushrod's deeds to this land we would never have been able to stop him."

Abigail smiled at that, a little too eager for even small praise.

They watched the Guys in White for while. The men were sweeping various instruments over the grounds. A couple were far down the slope stringing yellow plastic crime scene ribbon around the destroyed compound. One man came back with the two stretchers and placed them back in the Osprey. A rising cloud of dust farther down the mountain suggested the two injured men were being driven to the nearest hospital.

"Do you -- ah -- did--" Abigail asked, unable to finish her question.

"Did I kill Beaucoup Bucks? No. But since the radio is destroyed he's marooned in the Ghost Zone."

Abigail seemed relieved by that. Danny scooted around and leaned against the fallen tree and closed his eyes. All sorts of little shimmers danced across his eyelids. He was surprised how long the after-effects of the explosion was lasting.

Danny turned around to watch the Guys in White some more. They seemed to be picking up everything in sight and placing them in evidence bags. "I'd like to see them come around to some parks I know," Danny chuckled. "They could use a real good cleaning like that."

"I'd better get going. Danny Fenton will be wondering what happened here."

"Yeah I'd better get back, too." Abigail looked at him for a moment, fussed with her hair then added, "this is your one time, next time I see you, it's down to headquarters for dissection."

"Ya gotta catch me to do that," Danny called, levitating into the air. He turned west then thought of something else. Abigail was just swinging her leg over the saddle of the Strato-cycle.

With a wicked grin on his face, Danny turned invisible and swooped down behind her. Silently her reached around her and grabbed her breasts and gave them a gently squeeze. "Is that better," he breathed into her ear.

Abigail's scream was piercing. "You son of a –" she shouted, diving into her tote bag for a weapon. The first thing she pulled out was a Fenton Lipstick blaster. She laid a barrage of fire all about her, never coming close to Danny who had moved far away.

Abigail fumbled around in the tote again, bringing out the Fenton Finder. She popped open the access hatch where the mysterious daughterboard was located and ripped it out. Danny instantly showed up on her screen, something Danny only because aware of when her next shot nearly sliced his cowlick off his scalp.

Danny turned and headed deep into the Appalachian mountains.

"You'd better run, Ghost Boy!" she shouted. "You're paying for that!"

Danny lead her on a twisting path through the tall pines. With the Finder focused on him Danny wasn't able to shake her pursuit. His ability to pass through trees that she had to dodge around balanced out the greater speed of the Strato-cycle.

"No one touches my boobs and gets away with it!" She shouted. "Rat! Snake in the Grass! I thought you said 'No means no'?"

Her blaster fire was getting dangerously close. It was time to end this, Danny decided.

He popped out high in the air and dived straight for the wreckage of Beaucoup Bucks' schemes. He turned intangible and passed through a dozen GIW, the Osprey and part of the mountain top. Alarms, Danny was sure, were going off all around him. A Level One Ghost event if there ever was one.

Abigail was in close pursuit behind him. She was within a hundred yards of the wreckage when she realized Danny's trap. She threw the Strato-cycle into a flat turn that barely avoid the scattering agents. She hunched her head down, hoping that her father hadn't recognized her. (She had seen him.) More importantly, she knew she had to get home before her father did anything reasonable like call her mother to have her check up on her. In case the Guys in White had brought a Strato-cycle along on the Osprey she kept down among the trees where she would be hard to find.

"Damn it!" she cursed. "How could she have walked so blindly into such a obvious trap?"

Abigail Farley Smythe-Hyde stood up in the stirrups of the Strato-cycle and shook her fist in the air. "You'll pay for this Danny Phantom! If it's the last thing I do! You'll pay!"

With a sigh she sat down. "Why do all the bad boys have to be so cute?"


End file.
